


One Long Season

by rolameny



Series: Destiny fics [9]
Category: Destiny (Video Games)
Genre: Domestic, F/F, Hurt/Comfort, Old Friends Senior Warbeast Sanctuary, Red War era, Romance, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-10
Updated: 2019-03-10
Packaged: 2019-11-15 04:48:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 25,359
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18066878
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rolameny/pseuds/rolameny
Summary: A retired Cabal Legionary with a bad leg, sixteen warbeasts, and a Hidden warlock on the run after the disappearance of her Light. The math shouldn't add up to anything but a bad joke, but somehow, they make it work.





	One Long Season

Thaoz woke up at false dawn like she always did, the light and the stiffness in her leg pulling her together out of sleep. She sat up, stood, tested her leg: good. No cramps this morning. She rubbed at her eyes and pulled a robe on.

One door of her little bedroom led straight out to the garden, and when she opened it, light flooded in along the floor, spilling warm over her toes.

She stumped on out the door to the well. All the warbeasts, who always woke up at the sound of the hinges creaking, came just as stiffly to meet her.

They got three buckets of water from the well into the trough, two scoops of their food on the ground. She mixed it herself, shredded meat bulked out with dried vegetables and bone meal to get some calcium into them now that not all of them had the jaw strength to crack bones themselves anymore.

Thaoz drew up a bucket for herself and took down the old tin dipper from its nail. She sat on the low stone bench by the well, still cool against her thighs.

Most of the beasts ate or drank, yawning and stretching, but old Pask just came to put his head on her knee. The surgery to remove his jaw prosthetics hadn't gone too well, and since then he'd drooled. Thaoz resigned herself to a damp leg.

Laurg ambled over to one of her vines, sniffing with interest. Thaoz watched her. When she began to squat, Thaoz said in her warning tone, " _Hey_ there."

Laurg flexed her claws into the ground but got back up to piss on the stone wall around the garden instead. Laurg was new, dropped off by an old Legion acquaintance two months back. Not trained by any beast-Val Thaoz knew and still trying to push boundaries. She'd get there.

Pask snuffled against her knee, the morning light hitting the white edges on his muzzle scales where the colour was starting to go. Thaoz gave his skull a rub. She'd raised this one herself, and he'd come with her when she retired, pushed out of the Sand Eaters for the crimes of screwing up her leg and becoming useless. Tolok had given her such a jealous look when he saw her boarding the rotation ship — he didn't want to die there on a dry planet so far from everything that mattered.

Sometimes Thaoz thought that at least that would've been simpler. Easier than being sent back home with the rest of the worn-out equipment, waiting to be tallied up and replaced by the quartermaster.

She hadn't heard from Tolok in over a year, not since the Dominus left on his triumphal progress.

Thaoz gave Pask another pat and pushed his head off her knee. She put the dipper and bucket back in place, ready for the watering later, and did her morning stretches. They helped with her thigh and hip, and it was good to let her toes dig into the warming dirt.

It'd cool off again before true day came in later — the littler moon on this colony planet eclipsed the sun almost every morning. Just for a few minutes in the spring, but for almost an hour in the fall. It was early summer now, which meant fifteen minutes of dark. Thaoz checked the moon's progress: it was already beginning to nudge itself over the sun's face. A few minutes of light left, enough to get inside and turn a light on before she stumbled over a rake again.

Some of the friendlier warbeasts followed her in. They mostly acted as one pack outside, but after a lifetime in the army about a third of them wouldn't come in to any people-building if they weren't forced, and Thaoz couldn't blame them. It meant fewer beasts getting in her way or leaning against her legs while she was trying to cook, anyway.

Weaned off the drugs kept dripping into their blood during their years of service, some of the old beasts got sleepy, and spent their time lying in patches of sun. Some of them got friendly, more like the farmbeasts people kept out here to herd their animals and their kids. And some made up for it by getting angry all by themselves. Thaoz could fix their hurts, and she could train them not to bite anyone without her say-so, but she couldn't fix mad. They hadn't asked for what she and the rest of the beast-Vals had done. She hadn't asked for them, or this farm, or this retirement, but they were her responsibility now anyway.

Thaoz brushed at the spit on her knee. Time for a wash and her own breakfast.

When she came out of the bathroom later, dressed, tusks polished, the sun was crawling out from under the moon's shadow. Five beasts were piled under the kitchen table, legs tangling. Thaoz stepped around them.

She really wanted eggs in sauce, but the market would be today and she only had the one egg left till then. Instead she set it to boil and got out a round of bread to warm on the pot lid in the meantime. She'd use the water for her tea. There. _How's that for maximising efficiency, Quartermaster Thon_ , she thought to herself, and rolled her eyes.

Her tablet sat on the kitchen table, old military issue. A notification hovered above it, an orange holo bead reminding her to call her aunt. Thaoz flicked it away.

A bird yelled somewhere outside. Mad at Thaoz's beasts or just the sun for daring to show its face again. Light pushed itself further along the floor, warming it up by degrees. The pile of beasts under the table huffed when it reached them, painting them bright red.

Thaoz piled her breakfast — bread, egg, tea — onto a plate and went out to the porch. She mostly used it for storage space, but a crate of old tools was a fine chair, and a bucket turned upside-down did second duty as a footrest, for the sake of her damn knee.

Old Pask made his way out to her, stumpy tail wagging slow. He heaved himself up onto the crate next to her, and Thaoz moved her plate to make room. She sat her free hand on his head. The old IV line scar on his temple was smooth under her thumb.

She could see most of the farm from here: the little kitchen garden, the well, the beasts' shelter built up out of the equipment shed's overhang. The winegourd fields beyond that, vines and leaves already spreading low along the ground. They were just budding, which meant another two and a half months till harvest and the vintners came sniffing around to see how good her crop was. They were as gossipy as grandfathers, all of them, but they paid well.

Nobody on the colony made royal wine — they couldn't, not without Imperial permit to grow the flowers needed, and those wouldn't be coming through with the Dominus' Council in charge, but there was a growing market for the plainer wines they made. Something about the minerals in the clay that came through. They even made icewine down south by the pole. Up here, she stuck to the basics, but it'd worked out so far, and she had hopes again for this year.

If her crop turned out, anyway. Her neighbour Go'il in the bigger fields to the east had given her some advice and she'd corroborated the intel in town, so now she had branreed and beans growing together with the gourds. The beans used the reeds for a trellis and put nitrogen back into the ground, the gourds shaded their roots, and together they all grew better than they did alone. 

Go'il had spun that into some kind of metaphor about the Empire. Go'il was a patriot. But he knew his farming. She'd give him a bottle of wine if it worked out.

Thaoz drained the last of her tea. They were well into daylight now, and she had plenty to do. Weed, dust for mites, go over the irrigation piping. Check up on Tlu'ar, who'd been stung by a hornet last week and was still favouring that paw. Go through the kitchen to see what she needed from the market today. Check her messages. Call her aunt before she just showed up at the door to check up on Thaoz.

Find what needs doing and do it. One step after another, that was how you made a day, how you made a life. Even with a bum leg like hers.

Thaoz got up.

—

Before heading out Thaoz whistled at the beasts, _stay, guard_. She didn't need to lock up, not with more than a dozen warbeasts watching the farm.

Pask whined low in his throat as she closed the gate behind her. The jump over would be easy for him even now, but he knew to stay. 

"Go take a nap, old man," Thaoz told him, not using any of her command tones. Just quiet.

Karch and its market were an hour's walk, ten minutes by engine. Her aunt told her not to walk. Her medic told her the leg needed exercise. Thaoz deferred to her medic.

She wasn't taking her engine and trailer today, not with nothing to sell, and only small things to buy: eggs, twine, marrow bones, shellac if she could find any.

She walked beside the stone wall, its shadow skimming over her feet. Birds and insects argued, and the breeze made the leaves shake. Thaoz's muscles warmed as she walked, and by the time she reached the edge of her land, she was moving easy.

Then she heard the noise and went cold all over.

But she wasn't on Mars — she only had to dig her toes into the path to remember that. Warm, hard-packed dirt, not the unsteady sand of a desert planet.

She heard it again. Muffled this time. Thaoz looked around, down, and finally up. Perched in a tree, not hiding well at all, was an alien. One of the strange magic soldiers from Mars that wouldn't die, who kept company with little drones they called Dead People.

Thaoz glared up at them. The alien tried to shift out sight behind a branch. It didn't work. They were dressed up as a psion for some reason, even though psions were barely more common here outside the coastal cities than out-Empire aliens themselves. But the Dead Person was a giveaway, and so was the way they moved. Thaoz had served with psions for over a century, and whatever their gear or local gravity, they all moved like they were floating.

This alien just looked tired. Tired and scared.

Thaoz ground her teeth. She looked down again. At the road leading south to town. At the fields east, and the mountains on the horizon.

The Dead Person twitched in the alien's hands. 

Thaoz looked away.

"You can get water from the tank on the edge of the field," she said, after a long moment's silence. "Don't get close to the beasts or the house. Don't trample my vines." 

And she moved on again. The tree rustled as she moved under it. She didn't look up.

One step, then another, and she had a list long as her tusks of things to do today.

—

Thaoz's leg ached and the handle of her bag was cutting into her palm, and Go'il was calling her over from where his field bordered hers. Thaoz thought about ignoring him, but she went up anyway. 

"Morning," he said, and Thaoz tipped her head to him. His teff was doing well, bright green and calf-high behind him. He and his spouses had a three-person share of land and they worked it well, all together.

"Anything new in town?" he asked, and Thaoz gave him the updates. There was always some new petty grudge to chew over for entertainment, andthe second-best hardware store in town had a sale on hand diggers. 

He nodded. "Thanks. Now, your beasts were getting rowdy again earlier. Must've been a bat or something on your roof, because I could see them trying to get in your house, and I know you trained them better than that."

Thaoz blew out a sigh. "I'll take a look."

She knocked against the fence twice in thanks and moved on again. Her knee twinged and, back turned to Go'il, she let herself snarl.

The edge of her field wasn't disturbed and she couldn't see anything wrong with the beasts' lean-to or the kitchen garden, but her whole pack of warbeasts was lying in a loose circle around her house. Not resting — watching something on the roof.

Some of them picked up their heads and whined when she let herself through the garden gate. Thaoz set her bag down and propped her hands on her hips. The Martian should have gotten water from the irrigation tank and skirted the property and gone on to wherever they were going to, not cut through the field to be, apparently, chased through it by Thaoz's beasts.

She looked over the beasts nearest her. None of them looked injured, and none of them had their hackles up the way they would if they'd smelled blood. The Martian probably hadn't hurt them.

Bad decision. Bad impulse. Thaoz should have just called the police.

Pask came up and thumped his head against her thigh. She let a hand rest on his neck, scales warmed with the sun. "I know," she murmured to him. She didn't have it in her to cull an injured creature. An unmilitary deficiency.

She stooped to pick up a pebble and tossed it up at the roof. "Don't shoot. Or use magic. Or any of your Dead Person tricks. I'm coming up."

How had the alien gotten on her roof? There wasn't a good way up from the outside. If an alien had been through her house she would not be happy about it.

The beasts tried to come in with her, but she pushed them back out by the snouts and closed the kitchen door against them. The damn knee didn't like the stairs. The damn knee didn't have a choice.

The little farmhouse was a single storey, roof flat with a low rim around it to keep anyone from falling off too easily. The roof was good for storage or for laying laundry out to dry in the sun. Thaoz hadn't been up in a while: the boxes and racks were dusty and old leaves had blown in and trapped themselves in the corners.

And now there was an alien on it too.

In the light up here, the psion disguise was even more unsettling. It was almost perfectly realistic but unmoving, more mannequin than anything else.

Thaoz sighed. "Why are you here?"

The alien didn't say anything.

"Do you _want_ me to call the police?"

The Dead Person shot up from the alien's lap. In a perfect Mtorol accent, it said, "No! Wait!"

Thaoz had thought those little drones were just a collection of triangle shapes stuck together, but the triangles on this one were hanging loose off a round core. The triangles shivered and made chiming noises when they hit against each other.

The alien moved for the first time to grab the Dead Person back. They moved like there was something wrong with their arm, but hooked the Dead Person back into their lap and sat up against the roof's wall.

"Don't call anyone," they said, and their accent was just as good. How did an alien and their drone learn to speak like someone from the coast? 

The alien went on, "We'll be on our way as soon as we can. We won't ask anything from you. We're just waiting for those warbeasts to go to sleep."

Thaoz peered over the edge of the roof to the yard. The beasts were all looking up. Pask wagged his tail on seeing her, and that almost made her smile.

She turned back to the alien and their drone and crossed her arms. "They're light sleepers. You're not getting down again without help unless you want to kill all of them, and I will call the police if you try anything."

Her tablet was still on the kitchen table. She should have brought it up with her. The only useful thing she had on her was a folding knife in her pocket that she used for cutting twine.

Her knee gave a twinge. Thaoz sighed and sat down on a crate. This one was full of her brother's old winter gear that she should have sold off a long time ago. Too small for her, no use to anyone.

"Take off the mask, Martian. It's creeping me out."

"I can pay you," said the alien. Thaoz couldn't read their tone.

"And bring the police down on me for bribe-taking? No thank you. I'm not going to call them. Just take it off, I'm not having a conversation with someone who looks like a corpse."

The Dead Person muttered something Thaoz couldn't catch, but the alien shook their head, and peeled off the mask.

Thaoz didn't know what she was expecting, but what the alien looked like under their disguise was mostly: sweaty. A pinched brown face, two grey eyes, curly black hair that probably looked tidier when it hadn't been compressed by the weirdest masquerade Thaoz had ever seen. A nose that stuck out more than seemed like anybody's should, even an alien's.

The magician-soldiers always kept their helmets on, so Thaoz mostly knew of this species of aliens from fading posters in buried Martian cities. Still, the dark circles under their eyes didn't look like they should be there.

It took Thaoz some time to find her words again, but she finally settled on, "Huh."

"Happy now?" the alien asked, and reached up to touch their hair. They stopped the action halfway through, wincing. 

"As a warbeast in a butcher's dump." Thaoz leaned her elbows on her thighs and peered down at the alien. 

"And why aren't you letting yours turn this place into one?"

The drone muttered something again in a language Thaoz didn't understand, but it didn't take a counter-intelligence officer to catch the drift of something as obvious as _don't antagonize the enemy_.

"I'm grateful you aren't," the alien amended, "but I don't understand why not, and if you're going to I'd rather you would before any more of your military friends showed up."

 _What military friends?_ Thaoz asked herself, but the alien was already continuing, eyes half closed,

"Nobody gets out without important friends or a promotion to an intelligence job, and Karch doesn't have so much as a dedicated propagandist."

Their skin was getting greyer as they spoke. Was that normal?

"Closest agent's out in Filat Thod. I checked. So it's got to be friends. Bribe them for a quiet retirement? Smart move."

Their head thumped back against the wall.

Thaoz lifted a hand, getting worried. "Alright, don't hurt yourself. Hey. Drone. Dead Person. Is your person dying?"

The Dead Person rose out of the alien's slack grip. It held its triangle pieces tighter to its core now. "She just passed out again. She'll be up again in a minute, so don't try anything."

She had weeding to do. Her shopping had to be put away. She had to check on Tlu'ar and make sure the other beasts weren't gnawing through her irrigation pipes again. And she still hadn't called her aunt back.

Thaoz didn't have _time_ for this alien's crisis. She rubbed at her eyes.

"Are they — is she going to die? She looks like she needs medical care."

The drone's light flickered. In the interests of cutting them all out of the conversational loop, Thaoz added, "And no, I really am not calling the police, _or_ the military, and I don't know why, so stop asking. What does your magician need?"

The drone hung in the air. The light at its core, a little blue diamond, looked at her steadily.

"Water. A blanket. Some food — she hasn't eaten in two days. She can digest mostly anything you've got."

Thaoz nodded, sighed, and got up. 

The tablet in her kitchen had a notification bubble hovering over it again. Thaoz flicked it away and shuffled through her cabinets. All her cups were sized for her, and the alien was tiny… there, the set of shotglasses left over from when her brother had lived here. All three were dusty, so she rinsed one out, and went out into the yard. 

The beasts swarmed her, rumbling in their throats. Too well-trained to jump up on her, at least. She whistled _stand down, all calm_ to them.

"Smell something weird? Don't worry about it," she told them, and waded through them to get to her shopping bag, still set out on her garden wall. Before going back in she passed through the garden to collect some early vegetables. 

She put everything down on the porch and whistled, the two-note call for attention, and then called out, "Tlu'ar! Come here."

Tlu'ar slunk up to her, and Thaoz took five minutes to inspect her paw and how she was moving that leg.

"Well done," she told the beast, who would understand only that her tone was positive. "All healed up. Just remember to be careful around hornets."

And she slapped her side in dismissal. Tlu'ar was off like a shot — now Thaoz had reassured them, the whole pack was finding patches of sun to bask in. Tlu'ar would be draped over her brother Mennen and dozing in minutes. Thaoz collected all her things again, reached for the door, and heard a whine from her knee. It was Pask again.

"Want some company, old man?" she asked him. Quiet, just for him, she whistled _no aggression, wait for signal_ , and let him in the kitchen door ahead of her. She made sure to close it firmly behind her — she'd trust Pask to not savage an alien if she told him not to, but Laurg and a few others were better off without the temptation.

That gave her a thought, and after putting everything away, she went into her room. She had an old summer robe somewhere, sleeveless and belted and a little short on her, which meant it would be about three times too wide on the alien, but at least wouldn't drag on the ground if she wore it.

It would do for a blanket for now, and its scent would familiarize the beasts to her.

She sat down on her bed.

"What am I doing?" she asked Pask, who took the opportunity to lay his head on her knee. She rubbed his head. She should have thrown the alien off her roof for the beasts to eat. She should have not said anything to her in the tree. She should have called the police, or stopped in at the station when she got down to Karch. Let that military training take over and kicked the problem up to someone with more authority than her.

Then she thought about the way the alien and her drone had been hiding, both of them shivering, the alien wincing away from her own shoulder. Thaoz blew a breath out.

She got back up. 

In the kitchen, she started a pot of soup. She put in a marrow bone and plenty of leafy greens. Probably the alien needed iron. Once it got going, she bundled the robe, the cup, and a jug of water all together and stumped back up the stairs. 

Before she opened the door to the roof she whistled a stand-down to Pask, more firmly this time. She kept him behind her as she opened the door, giving him time to get used to the smell of the alien before she let him onto the roof itself.

The alien was awake again, propped up against a crate now. Her eyes widened at the sight of Thaoz, or maybe Pask, and the light on the drone flickered.

"Don't do anything," Thaoz said. She set down everything she was carrying. "This is Pask. He's retired, same as me. Don't magic him and he won't savage you."

"No worries there," the alien said, voice barely there. "Is that water?"

Thaoz poured her a cup. The alien reached for it, then grimaced and pulled her arms back in to — peel off what had been, apparently, a set of gloves. Psions all had an extra digit they tucked into the middle finger of their gloves, and Thaoz hadn't realized the Martians had the extra finger too. The alien's hands were tiny, and the shotglass was still almost too big for her when she took it.

The alien drank slow. Hopefully that meant she would keep it down.

Thaoz sat on a crate and Pask immediately clambered up next to her.

She had no idea what to say now. Probably the alien didn't either, from the way she kept her head down to drink.

The drone did. "If you don't have any military friends how do you have so many warbeasts? They're not legal to import here."

Pask's hackles went up next to her. Thaoz soothed him and herself by laying a hand on his spine. "Why do you keep asking about the military?"

The alien said, quietly, into her cup: "It's the one thing that doesn't make sense. They don't let their soldiers go, not without pressure of one kind or another. Cabal soldiers retire for politics or intelligence work, not farming."

Tired out from her speech, she took another drink.

Thaoz sighed. "No business of yours, alien. How'd _you_ get so far from home?"

The alien shrugged with her good shoulder and didn't say anything.

The thing that had been nudging at Thaoz's mind this whole time finally came into focus. It said: why one of the Martian wizards here, on a little colony planet on the wrong side of the Empire from their solar system? Why the psion getup, and why, contrary to every fact or rumour she'd ever heard, was she still injured, and not dripping blue light from her fingertips?

She rubbed at her face. "How many counter-intelligence agents am I going to have coming after me for harbouring a spy?"

"None," the drone said, immediately. "Nobody spotted us. We're _very_ good at our job."

"How do you know? How much access to intelligence do you have?"

The alien flinched this time, but said, "Enough to know that much."

She looked up to meet Thaoz's eyes with her own. It was jarring, her still looking exactly like a psion from neck to ankles, and that Martian (human?) face above it.

"What has the local news been saying about the Dominus lately?"

The way this alien kept jumping topics was exhausting. "Nothing. Still out on his triumphal progress. Re-conquering the Rrhen in the name of the Empire for all we know."

"He isn't in the Rrhen system," said the alien, and passed a hand over her face.

It took Thaoz a minute, and then she felt abruptly like a concussion grenade had gone off in her house. 

"The Legions out there—" she said, sick to her stomach. "They won't have heard, they'll try to fight him—"

"Try," the alien repeated. "But... they weren't his primary target."

She hadn't used any of her magic at all. She had at least one broken bone. Thaoz had always thought the mage soldiers couldn't be hurt permanently till you got rid of their companion drones, and here this one still was, chassis dingy but whole. 

Thaoz looked again at the alien huddled on her rooftop. Her hands clenched on her thighs. "I'm sorry," she said, voice low. She'd heard the aliens had something on their home planet that was the source of their powers. It was probably gone now. 

Thaoz might be the last survivor from her regiment. This alien might be one of the last of her own people.

The Dominus was probably deep-mining her planet already.

Pask whined. Thaoz occupied herself with soothing him. When she looked up again, the alien had composed herself. 

"And that should answer most of your questions," she said, voice level. "May I have some more water?"

She reached out with her bad arm again. She winced.

"Not with that arm, you can't," Thaoz replied, and surprised herself with what came out of her mouth next. "Take it with your left. And let me splint that. You'll have to stay till it heals — you're easy prey for any mother bat out there till it does. 

"I'm Thaoz," she concluded gracelessly.

The alien looked at her without blinking. She was still as a cricket before it sang. She said, "My name is Leilan Tel."

Her drone flickered its segments out from its body, quick, and then pulled them back in close. 

"And this paranoid ball of sunshine is Zulbia," she added. She held out her hand, the left this time. "Now can I have some water?"

Thaoz reached to fill her cup.

—

Leilan Tel didn't say much else that day. Thaoz went down after some first aid to get the soup, and to let Pask back into the yard with the rest of the beasts. They all came up to sniff his sides, smelling the stranger on him.

Thaoz weeded. She checked the irrigation lines. She hauled herself back up to the roof with soup. She did her exercises. She did a round of training with the beasts. She refilled the water trough. She ate some soup. She started a batch of dough.

The beasts that liked to wander to the edges of her brother's land came streaming in as the sun began to set. The melting-gold light turned the scarred old beasts to faceted gems in its path, and Thaoz propped herself up on the rim of the well to look at them. They were out of place on this farm, but catch them at the right time, and they were beautiful anyway.

Laurg squatted by the borage, spoiling the view. Thaoz sighed and got up to chase her away.

The sun sank further down. Thaoz went inside, and then caught herself standing by an open cupboard, staring into space and not thinking. She made herself pick out a pile of blankets and sheets. Then, knee complaining, she brought it all up to the roof.

Leilan Tel was asleep, collarbone wrapped in a clean bandage and her right arm in a sling, left pillowing her head. Zulbia in her lap looked up when the door opened. 

"I brought things for the night," Thaoz said, trying to keep her voice quiet. "I don't have a spare mattress, but we can rig a pallet."

Zulbia floated up and over to Thaoz, looking even smaller up close. "Do you need anything?" Thaoz asked.

They rattled the front row of their little triangle pieces. "No thank you — if Leilan Tel's comfortable, I am."

Thaoz set down her armload. Something occurred to her. "Is it... symbiosis? Between you drones and your magicians."

Zulbia made a brief sound of noise like a burst from a badly tuned radio, and said, "Probably not the way you're thinking! I don't have physical needs. Half of me doesn't even exist in physical reality as you know it."

Thaoz thought about this. She had no way to react to it. She decided on, "Huh."

She kneeled to make up a bed for Leilan Tel.

"And I'm not a drone," Zulbia added, voice click-clicking. "There's no good way to translate our names for it into Ulurant, but we're partners. Neither of us is _equipment_."

Thaoz nodded. A thin beam of light played over the blanket she was folding into a rough mattress, cool and white.

"You made this way too long," Zulbia said.

Thaoz sat back on her heels. She looked at the blanket. She looked at Leilan Tel. She scratched the base of a tusk.

She folded the blanket again, this time making it half as wide and only two-thirds as long.

It would make a more padded bed this way, at least. But it still looked awfully small.

Once she was done, she looked over at Zulbia. "Should I move her, or should we wake her up and let her move herself?"

Zulbia floated back to their magician. Thaoz thought they would use another beam of light to wake her up, but instead Zulbia just banged their little body into Leilan Tel's good shoulder.

Leilan Tel's eyes flew open. They went wider for a moment at the sight of Thaoz, but then she was sitting up. 

"What's the crisis?"

"Just the crick in your neck — I can feel it from here," said Zulbia, tone cheerful. "Come on, get into bed."

They chivvied Leilan Tel under the covers. Thaoz got up to leave the two of them alone with a final warning to not leave any lights going overnight.

What was that line of Tolok's, about paranoia? Nothing helpful. Thaoz left the door to the roof unlocked, but shut up the downstairs for once. That would give her a few moments' warning if a colossus squad came for them all in the middle of the night.

Pask slept on the end of her bed. Thaoz didn't push him off.

—

The sun woke up and Thaoz woke with it. She swung one leg out, but the other seized up on her. She set her teeth in her bottom lip and stretched it out along the mattress to work out the cramp.

Pask, a lump half-hidden by blankets, opened an eye and sneezed at her. Then he tucked his head more firmly under a paw.

Thaoz kneaded at her leg. It relaxed eventually and then she could get up.

The eclipse after false dawn was just barely longer than it had been yesterday. True summer was on its way.

The chores: feeding and watering the beasts, the alien magician on the roof, herself, and the farm, in that order. 

Leilan Tel was half-awake and propped up against the wall again when Thaoz nudged the door to the roof open, Zulbia a little lump tucked into the blanket with her.

Thaoz lifted her arm — she had a bowl in her hand and a canteen strap around her wrist, carefully balanced. "I brought you some food and water. You should be lying down."

"Can't sleep," she said. Thaoz's robe was tucked up around her shoulders. It was even bigger than Thaoz had pictured — Leilan Tel was swimming in it. She concentrated on getting everything arranged neatly on the ground. 

Leilan Tel reached for a bowl with her splinted arm and winced. Thaoz said, exasperated, "How do you keep managing to forget three breaks across two bones? A month-old warbeast is better at keeping off its injuries than you are."

She shrugged and winced again. "Injuries don't usually last long enough for me to bother remembering them."

These magicians would never make sense to Thaoz. "Try, or it won't ever heal."

Thaoz passed her the bowl, brushing against Leilan Tel's thin fingers. Both of them flinched back; Thaoz barely rescued the bowl before it could spill.

She folded her hands in her lap while Leilan Tel began to eat. The moon dipped below the horizon as the sun kept rising.

"You should stay up here today and rest," Thaoz said. One night of rest hadn't done anything to shift the deep bruises under Leilan Tel's eyes.

Leilan Tel frowned. She touched her hair. "Is there any way I could wash?"

Thaoz thought. "As long as you take it easy on that arm, I'll bring you up a basin." She thought some more. "And some sheets to hang up on the drying poles to block the view from the road."

Not many people came by her farm, but she didn't want to chance someone passing and seeing an alien on her roof.

Leilan Tel nodded. Her eyes were already drifting shut again.

Thaoz got up and left as quietly as possible.

—

Two more days passed like that, quiet and tense. The dark marks under Leilan Tel's eyes faded a little and she breathed easier, but her arm didn't show any sign of improvement. How long did humans take to heal? Thaoz kept wanting to offer her calcium chips like she would with the beasts.

Leilan Tel had at least slept enough to start going stir-crazy cooped up on the roof, so Thaoz let her down into the house. The first time, she was down only long enough to shower before having to go back up to her pallet and rest, but the day after that, she came down in the morning and sat at the kitchen table as Thaoz went in and out on her chores. Thaoz felt weird about an alien seeing her before she was ready for the day, getting breakfast ready in her robe with her face not even scrubbed yet, but the alien was in one of her robes too, so. Leilan Tel had pulled off the last parts of her psion disguise — limb extenders for her legs, a padded jacket and leggings that mimicked psion muscles eerily well — and now she was in a black underlayer, a long two-piece bodysuit with stirrup ankles she layered with the robe Thaoz had given her. It made her look like a recovering athlete waiting till her coach let her back in the water.

Thaoz pressed wells into her pan of sauce with the back of her spoon and cracked eggs into them one by one to cook. She passed the shells absentmindedly down to Pask, sprawled in front of the stove, getting in her way. He crunched them up, jaws smacking. A pile of flatbread, baked against the oven's walls till they blistered, sat tucked into a folded towel waiting for the rest of the meal.

Leilan Tel sat at the kitchen table, perched on a tall stool Thaoz had scavenged from the shed that brought her up to a comfortable height. The kitchen counters went up to her shoulders, and the cupboards above them were unreachable.

She was working on her creepy psion mask, poking at its insides with a pair of tweezers small enough they looked more like a needle to Thaoz.

"You have a lot of warbeasts," Leilan Tel said, sounding calm. Now that she wasn't panicked and near death, she was mostly silent, and when she spoke, it was in a calm voice that didn't show much. "Is this one a pet?"

Thaoz's hand stalled out on Pask's snout, where she had rested it for just a moment after he ate his last shell.

"A fellow retiree. We were on Mars together."

The low-angled sun glanced up from the mica flecks in the stone floor; the sauce bubbled quietly in its pan. Leilan Tel twisted on her stool to face Thaoz more fully.

"I didn't know any of the Legions kept warbeasts on Mars — I'd never heard of any."

"It was a temporary deployment." Thaoz shifted her weight off her bad leg. "Just a decade or so. They shut the program down and kicked us home. Pask here was trained on our deployment before that, peacekeeping in Clipse space."

He was nearing thirty — if they were still in the field he'd be dead by now. Thaoz hoped he liked their retirement more than she did.

Leilan Tel set down her tweezers. "Zulbia told me I asked you too many questions about that when I was out of it. And that I should probably apologize."

Thaoz shrugged down at the stove. "Brains do that when you're sick. And it _doesn't_ make sense. I should have been reassigned when the Mars beast squadron got shut down, but they told me there was some loophole in the old Emperor's citizenship decree, and here was this farm with nobody to work it. Some tablet-tapper out in home orbit thought they were doing me a favour."

She turned away to shut off the burner and drag bowls and spoons out of their cupboards. While she set up their breakfast at the table, Leilan Tel wrapped her mask and tools back up. She didn't say anything else. Thaoz was grateful for it.

They ate quietly till Pask began to pace by the door, and Thaoz got up to let him out (and knee Tlu'ar back onto the porch when she tried to nose her way in).

She got back to the table and poured them both more tea. Leilan Tel nodded in thanks, and said, lightly, with all the weight given to a comment on the weather, "I might be retired now too, for all I know. I've lost all communication with my home system."

Thaoz set her cup down gently, like the heavy stoneware might crack in her hands. "Where were you going, when my beasts spooked you up my roof?"

"A safehouse of mine," Leilan Tel said, calm and opaque as ever. Thaoz reminded herself that she was a spy. She wouldn't tell Thaoz anything real, and Thaoz shouldn't want to know, because her knowing anything was evidence against her.

That did seem to shut down the conversation. Thaoz took a drink of her tea and tried not to think _you should know better, beast-Val_.

"Hopefully Zulbia and I won't be in your way much longer."

Thaoz looked up and shrugged. "As long as you get out of here before anyone spots you here."

She should probably care more about the alien spy in her kitchen for the Empire's sake. She couldn't force herself to.

Thaoz cleared the dishes and Leilan Tel dragged her tools back out. She frowned down at the mask, its slack mouth and open eyes.

"Do you have a battery I could use? Just for a minute."

Thaoz couldn't see the connection, but she still thought it over, tapping the counter with a nail as she did. She went and got her tablet from where she'd put it — the top shelf in her closet, high up enough a five-foot-nothing alien couldn't reach it even standing on a chair. The back popped off easy enough, and then the battery too, a little flat disc. The light on the tablet's front blinked off, its screen going a deeper black.

She came back out to the kitchen and handed it to Leilan Tel, who looked up and smiled.

Leilan Tel drew a wire out of the mask's neck piece and said to Thaoz, "Watch this."

When she touched the wire to the battery the mask moved. Its eye blinked, first the thin sideways eyelid and then the thicker upper one. A muscle twitched in its cheek. The motion was small enough Thaoz would never have noticed it on a living psion. 

"That's the creepiest thing I've seen in fifty years," Thaoz said.

Leilan Tel was smiling. "It's not creepy when I wear it. I've fooled psions into thinking we're cousins with this thing — good to know I can make it work with regular electricity."

That gave Thaoz pause. She stopped hovering and sat down again. "How does it usually work, then?"

The smile wiped itself from Leilan Tel's face, leaving it blank again as an empty plate. She turned her hand over, palm up. "Light, usually. Magic."

Zulbia appeared out of nowhere — dropping into reality like a holo turning on — to sit on her shoulder.

Thaoz didn't know what to say. She looked again at the mask. It blinked; its cheek twitched.

"Does it run on a cycle?" she asked finally. Leilan Tel nodded.

"Well, I'm impressed," Thaoz said, and got up again.

She finished cleaning. Leilan Tel went back up to the roof; Thaoz went out to the field and walked the rows, pulling weeds and unplugging more than one hole in the irrigation lines. The beans were doing well enough that she could start gathering some early for herself before the main harvest. Thaoz would have to fix the combine before then. That gave her about a month to haul it out of the shed and find out what had gone wrong with its gravity field generators.

She leaned against the irrigation tank and sighed. Tlu'ar, ambling along with her sister Erroz, came up to press her snout into Thaoz's hand.

Thaoz pulled a calcium chip from her pocket and let Tlu'ar snap it out of her fingers.

"Look at you," she said to the beast, tail thumping at the warm dirt. "You've gone all domesticated."

—

The next three days followed the same pattern: Leilan Tel spent her afternoons on the roof, resting and staying out of sight, but in the morning came down to join Thaoz for breakfast, keeping her hands busy with repairs to her gear. Once she'd finished getting her suit up to whatever specifications she had in mind, she packed it carefully away in a bag and that in a crate, hidden under a stack of Thaoz's brother's old things. 

After that she seemed to get bored, and Thaoz came in from feeding the beasts one morning to find Leilan Tel lying on the floor, wrestling one-armed with the pipes under the sink.

Thaoz stopped in the doorway. Leilan Tel looked up, her hair making a curling frame around her face. She grinned, and her eyes crinkled.

All she said was, "I know," sounding like she was laughing at herself.

Thaoz laughed a little herself. She came through the kitchen to sit on the floor by Leilan Tel, and passed her tools as she needed them.

The two of them waited out that morning's entire eclipse like that, their hems overlapping on the kitchen floor, occasionally brushing hands as they passed torque wrenches back and forth.

That afternoon, Thaoz came up to the roof to find Leilan Tel doing some slow exercises, right arm back in its sling and pressed to her front. The clothes hanging up to dry on poles and racks kept her from signalling her presence to the road — that was one thing you could say in favour of harbouring alien spies: Thaoz had been digging up all the clothes and linens she'd tucked away so it would look like she actually was doing laundry and not purposely blocking off eyelines to her roof.

She was even wearing a pair of wrap-waist pants she'd forgotten she had.

Leilan Tel didn't stop her exercise, but did pivot on her heel as she moved so she faced Thaoz more fully. There was a faint grimace on her face.

"I'm not going to tell you what to do," Thaoz said. She shifted the laundry basket on her hip, trying to find a position that wouldn't aggravate her knee. "But if you're bored — want to come down to the equipment shed and help me fix a busted gravity field generator?"

Leilan Tel lit up.

Thaoz went out first and whistled for her beasts' attention, loud enough to reach the furthest edge of the farm. They came in a stream from all around, some from their lean-to, some from the field, a few dropping down from tree branches. They all sat at attention in front of her in a ragged bunch, waiting for her orders.

The first order of business: Thaoz whistled _pay attention; friend near_ , and opened the porch door. Leilan Tel stood behind it, and now all the beasts got their first real whiff of her since they chased her up to the roof.

A few of them edged nearer — Erroz, who was one of the younger ones, and Laurg. Thaoz repeated her whistle to reinforce it.

Pask, at the edge of the crowd, came right up the porch steps. He pressed his blunt head against her thigh, then passed her to go to Leilan Tel. Leilan Tel was standing carefully still, face calm in that opaque way of hers, but looking ready to move. 

Pask just pressed his entire side into her hip, making her stumble. He sneezed.

Leilan Tel put a hand on his back — the first time she'd touched any of them. And that seemed to do the trick. Even Laurg relaxed. 

Thaoz relaxed with them. She gave her second command: _stay on guard; stealth needed_. Then she dismissed them all, and they all left again, some back to their old posts, some spacing out along the farm's perimeter. Pask gave a quiet huff as he passed her again on his way down the steps. They would keep an eye out for her, and if anyone came near, they'd come get her without raising a howl.

Sixteen well-trained warbeasts were better than any electronic security system, to Thaoz's mind.

"You've got them well-trained," Leilan Tel commented, quiet.

"It's not something you forget," Thaoz said. She led the way around the garden and through the fields. The winegourds were small and pale but their leaves were dark and beginning to spread, right on time. The branreed was coming along well — it was only a foot shy of Leilan Tel's own height, the stalks' tops already prickling with awns. If she stayed much longer she wouldn't even have to duck to hide in the fields.

"And it's good for them," she added. "They're bred and trained to work. They get bored with nothing to do but snap at each other. I train them on new signals just to keep them busy."

Leilan Tel nodded. "Like enrichment."

"For them and me." They passed the bare patch of dirt that surrounded the beasts' lean-to — it was scattered with old crates and a few massive spools, each big enough for three warbeasts to sun themselves on. Thaoz had gotten them cheap from her favourite hardware store in town; its owner Arrox bought spools of wire and rope she sold by length, and then, like she told Thaoz, didn't have anything to do with the spools themselves. A few other farmers who kept goats took them off her hands sometimes, and she'd thought maybe Thaoz's beasts would like them too.

It was a good hardware store. Thaoz ordered all her seed through it these days.

She opened the door to the shed. It was where she kept all her equipment, and it was piled high enough to make narrow aisles between the bags of feed and rolls of wire fencing. Thaoz flipped the light on and threaded her way to the back of the shed, where the combine sat under a tarp and a bag of Sorn plaster. It had that familiar logo on it, a cicada sitting on a cliff. Thaoz's family was from Sorn; that logo had been everywhere growing up, buildings and packaging and the uniform the company's workers wore. She shifted the bag — it should really have been put with the warbeast things — she only kept it because she mixed it with bone broth to settle their stomachs when they got into the ivy. 

Thaoz pulled the tarp off the combine and stepped back.

"How is it broken? And, maybe more importantly… what does it do?"

Leilan Tel moved closer to it. Zulbia popped out of nowhere like they did sometimes and played a beam of light over it, making a tuneless kind of humming noise as they did.

"It's a combine harvester," Thaoz said. "This kind of model is good for small farms like this one, especially with mixed-crop fields. It got stuck on something halfway through last year's harvest and I haven't been able to get it to start up since. I'll need it in a few weeks for the beans — I am _not_ doing them by hand."

"So where does the gravity generator come in?" Leilan Tel asked, sounding baffled. Before Thaoz could answer, Zulbia made one last noise and popped up a holo in front of both of them in shades of blue and white: the combine's insides, blown up like a diagram.

"I think we missed a trick focusing on military technology," they said, and Leilan Tel leaned in.

Thaoz rubbed at the base of a tusk. Should she be worried about alien spies saving blueprints of farming equipment?

"It can generate gravity fields to affect things at pretty small scale," she explained. "You can tell it to affect, say, skinny things roughly four inches long and around five grams, and float all the beans off the plants without having to pick them by hand or bringing the bran or gourds with them."

Zulbia's segments all flared out. "That's smart," they said, sounding surprised.

Thaoz snorted at them. "It's practical. But finicky, and you can end up pulling all the leaves off your plants if you're not careful."

Leilan Tel put a hand up to Zulbia's holo and spun a piece of it around — Thaoz hadn't known it could do that. She tapped at a segment.

"If this thing is built the way I think it is, it might be a simple blown capacitor. But if it's that important, you might just call a specialist."

Thaoz sighed. "It's out of warranty. Everyone I called just told me to buy new."

The corners of Leilan Tel's mouth went up. "Some things really are universal."

"You don't have to be the one to fix it," Thaoz said, curling her hands around the dusty tarp. "Don't worry about it, if you don't want to or can't. It's just if you want something to do or a change of pace from the roof."

"Oh, no, this is great," Leilan Tel said, rotating a piece of the holo engine one last time. She looked around. "Can we clear a workspace?"

Thaoz followed her gaze. "Definitely," she said. "Hold on—"

She ducked out the door of the shed again and looked around, checking sightlines.

"I can get the crates of tools and all the plaster and spare bricks out under the beasts' shelter and swing that shelf out, and then nobody will be able to see into the back half of the shed here even if they get close."

"Is anyone out there right now?"

Thaoz shook her head, and Leilan Tel crouched low and slunk her way up to the door to make her own assessment. She was careful about it, too, not relying on Thaoz's intel. 

Leilan Tel came back in and nodded. "It's a good plan. Does the door lock?"

"I've got a deadbolt somewhere I can install on the inside for you."

"Sounds good — thank you."

They got to work, Thaoz hauling things out to organize up against the shed's outside wall and Leilan Tel spreading the tarp out on the floor inside and sitting down on it to go over Zulbia's holo with them in more detail.

Erroz swung by on what looked like a patrol of the farm, sniffing at the crates and huffing softly at Thaoz. She huffed back and Erroz sauntered off again, satisfied.

The work went well — Thaoz had to scramble all around the shed to reorganize it, but Leilan Tel seemed to have an instinct for moving around her on her own errands without them bumping into one another. 

After she installed the deadbolt, Thaoz took a break to prop herself up on a crate just inside the door. Her leg was giving her sharp warnings not to push herself 

Leilan Tel clanked around behind her, disassembling a piece of the combine while Zulbia scanned it.

One of the beasts came up through the fields from the south — Laurg, with the posture of a beast on alert. She came into the shed to sit in front of Thaoz. The clanking behind them stopped as Leilan Tel peered around the shelf.

Thaoz gave the whistle that meant _show me the problem_. Laurg took off again, hackles up, leading Thaoz towards the house. Thaoz shut the shed door behind her.

They turned the corner to the front of the house and Thaoz saw… some kid with a little engine and a basket balanced on its back, just two steps inside the fence, surrounded by warbeasts.

The kid couldn't be more than sixty, their tusks bare nubs just emerging from their jaw. Thaoz sighed and whistled, _stand down_.

The kid jerked around at the noise and went even paler at the sight of her.

"What is it? They won't bite," Thaoz said, her leg making her more snappish than she wanted to be. "Neither will I."

The kid made a face, probably without meaning to. "Um. Uh. Delivery?"

"I'm not expecting anything."

The kid made another face.

"Here, let me see that slip."

She pulled it out of the kid's limp fingers and scanned it. It had her full name on it, which meant it was either something government, something military, or — ugh.

The name in the _from_ field confirmed it. A care package from her aunt, moving up from passive-aggressive voice messages to physical reminders that Thaoz wasn't paying enough attention to her.

"Can I pay you to return this to sender?"

The kid shook their head silently. Thaoz was almost impressed. Clearly scared out of their wits by a scarred veteran with a dozen warbeasts, but stubborn enough to insist on doing their job. Even if Thaoz wished they wouldn't.

She sighed and signed on the dotted line. They traded slip for basket, and Thaoz whistled again for all the warbeasts to slink back off to where they'd been.

Before kickstarting their engine, the kid thanked her in a squeaky voice. Well. Thaoz, bemused, waved them off.

Bizarrely, when she got back to the shed and sat down on a crate, Leilan Tel thought it was _funny_ , though Zulbia was holding their segments in a way that looked worried. 

"Overbearing family members," she said, as if it explained anything. "Most everyone in the universe has them."

Leilan Tel's expressions didn't ever spread very wide over that windless calm she kept on it, but Thaoz thought she was starting to be able to read them. There was amusement in the way she tucked her mouth into her cheek and in the set of her eyebrows.

Thaoz couldn't help but see a little of the humour in it too, at that. "Alright," she conceded. "But I usually don't have to interact with the rest of the universe's overbearing family. Just my Aunt Tlalal."

It wasn't that she was Thaoz's only aunt, or family member, just the only one who'd made it out of their hometown on the Empire's crown planet, other than Thaoz's brother. She'd come here for business to take advantage of the low tax rates the government was enticing prospective colonists with, and Ute-atl had followed later to take advantage of another deal: farm the land and after a century it would be yours.

Ute had died fifteen years in, and then before the land could be taken back the warbeast program on ES70/P4 had gone belly-up, and someone with access to those files thought they were solving two problems in one. The land had someone to work it and the beast-Val with the bad leg had an assignment where she wouldn't be a liability. And Aunt Tlalal had lost a nephew and wasn't keen on losing the niece shaken out of the government's pocket into her lap either. Thaoz didn't like it, but she understood it.

She ended up telling most of that to Leilan Tel as she untangled two lengths of irrigation tubing from each other. Leilan Tel, cross-legged and compact on her tarp, nodded thoughtfully.

"And that's why the package?"

"That's why the package." Neither of them spoke for a while, the silence as comfortable as an old coat. Thaoz got the last tricky knot unpicked and hissed in quiet triumph, then asked, "Don't you have any overbearing relatives?"

Leilan Tel looked up from a circuit board, tucking a piece of hair behind her ear. "It's just me and Zulbia. And they only count as overbearing sometimes."

Zulbia rattled their pieces at her, sounding like someone shaking a set of dice in a bowl.

" _Sometimes_ , I said."

Thaoz smiled down at the coil of hose in her hands. It had left her palms striped with dirt, but she could go wash up at the well later.

She picked up one end of the second piece of hosing and started to straighten it out, making sure it didn't twist anywhere before she began to wrap it around itself. 

Thaoz took longer than she normally would, but it was nice inside the shed. Maybe a little dusty, but shaded and cool after the heat outside. And she was resting her leg.

Leilan Tel on the tarp running her thin hands over a disassembled motor had nothing to do with it.

They continued their routine the next day, breakfast in the kitchen together before hustling Leilan Tel out to the shed, where she continued to work on the engine. It made her eyes brighter, and she talked a little more, about engineering and the work she'd been doing in Empire space.

"Commercial air traffic scheduling, mainly," she said as Thaoz braced a panel for her to unscrew. "Plenty of psions doing office work down in Mtorol, and you learn a lot from who's flying where and with what cargo."

Thaoz must have made a face at that, because Leilan Tel added, "It's a safer strategy long-term than snooping around at night for secrets under high security. We had passive bugs set up for that. They should have let us know the second the Dominus filed plans to go for the Sol system. I don't know why they didn't. It doesn't make _sense_."

It took a moment, but she slipped her calm expression back on, a mask made of more than just rubber. Thaoz's hands tightened on the metal so she wouldn't do anything rash like put one on Leilan Tel's shoulder.

They finished unscrewing the panel. Thaoz propped it against a wall out of the way and Leilan Tel collected her little handful of screws, setting them aside in the upturned lid of an old jam jar Thaoz had kept just in case it turned out to be useful and then forgotten about till she had cleared out the shelf it had been on.

Three long minutes later, her head stuck halfway into the combine's guts, Leilan Tel said, quietly as though she was talking to the machine, "I can't figure you out."

Thaoz looked up from the bags of warbeast feed she was shifting.

"You're harbouring an alien spy and you seem more worried about how my arm's healing than what I was running from when I broke it. You don't care when I talk about passing information to enemies of your Empire that you fought yourself on Mars even though you jump half the time when you hear Zulbia materialize. You got an out from an army with a ninety-six percent mortality rate and you're pissed about it but you're still not doing anything with it."

Her voice stayed low but got more intense as she spoke. She extracted herself from the combine and turned to face Thaoz, her hands frozen on a feed bag.

Thaoz swallowed. Her throat was dry. She put down the bag.

She left to — to go check on Tlu'ar's paw one last time. She felt blind, stumbling out of that shed.

She closed the door behind her.

— 

Thaoz's leg hurt when she woke up and she shook it out angry with her body, angry with herself.

She went outside to get the warbeasts their breakfast, limping as she went, not wanting to take the time it would need to massage the cramp out. 

Pask had slept outside and now he came creeping up to her as she stood at the well. She fished in the feed bin for a good long piece of meat and gave it to him to gnaw on.

She didn't want to sit down. Thaoz stood there, leaning against the side of the well, and watched the rising sun hide itself under the moon.

The eclipse was half an hour long today, and as she watched it her anger slipped away, leaving her feeling tired and hollow, like someone had scooped away all her insides with a spoon and rinsed her out with something sour.

Thaoz looked over the yard, doing a quick headcount of the beasts. They at least seemed all right, though Laurg was snapping at the others over her share more than usual. 

That, she could deal with later. For now… Thaoz sighed, took a last look at the sun's curve breaking free of the moon, and got up. 

She started to make a more involved breakfast than usual, meaning to make up for its lateness by bringing it up to the roof. Thaoz had made fried lentil patties the other day and Leilan Tel had eaten them with real enthusiasm — she could make those again. 

She had turnip greens wilting in one pan and oil heating in another when the beasts took up a howl outside, low and long, a warning. Thaoz didn't even stop to dry off her hands before rushing to the door and yanking it open. She didn't have her pressure armour or her Legion firearms any more, what would she do if there were hostiles—

There was a hostile. Halfway up the garden path, posture like a siege dancer, enameled tusks gleaming in the morning light, was her aunt.

The beasts all crouched far off the path, their baying breaking off when they saw her.

"Thaoz-uthavim Izorn," said Aunt Tlalal, "You have _got_ to get better at answering your messages."

She bulled up the path with her bag clamped under her arm, not sparing a single glance for the crowd of warbeasts. Aunt Tlalal had never been in the Legions but she made a great impression of a val with two hundred years of experience. Half a millennium in commerce had done that, maybe, but Thaoz thought she had probably been like that since birth.

"Good morning, Aunt," she said. "This — uh, this isn't a great time for a visit."

"And you could have told me that one of the five times I called you this week." Aunt Tlalal pushed past her into the house. Her engine, a bright green, sat on the dirt road outside the gate. It didn't look like it was loaded down for an extensive visit, but —

Thaoz turned around and limped furiously into the kitchen after her aunt. Who was inspecting the place and sniffing at her pots.

"It is good to see you're eating well. We've all been worried," she said, and then: "These lentils could use more verjus, Thaoz-uthavim, dear."

Thaoz had to get rid of her aunt before she noticed anything wrong. She clenched her fists and realized she had a paring knife in her hand. She set it down and said, carefully, "Thank you for thinking of me, but it's a really busy time of year on the farm, and I don't have room for a guest."

"Oh, I can't stay long," Aunt Tlalal said, nearly dismissive. "I'm on my way to Filat Thod with some product samples. But we can have a nice breakfast together, can't we? You can tell me all about how the farming is going. And your pack of beasts, I suppose."

Aunt Tlalal was just about the same height as Thaoz, but age had given her frame solidity, and Thaoz didn't think she could physically move her in real gravity. She would have to find a way to convince her to leave.

Aunt Tlalal flipped the heat off on the stove. "You shouldn't leave burners unattended. Now, how about we eat on the roof? I remember Ute-atl was so pleased with the space."

The suggestion and the mention of her brother left Thaoz poleaxed for a moment too long. Aunt Tlalal was already heading for the door leading to the stairs, which Thaoz had — left ajar in case Leilan Tel wanted to come down earlier —

She couldn't keep up with her aunt on the stairs, not with her leg still stiff and fighting her the whole way. Thaoz cursed herself the whole way up, heart hammering in her throat, hip screaming at her.

Thaoz burst out onto the rooftop. 

It was completely empty except for her aunt, already at the wall, looking out onto the field.

Aunt Tlalal turned to look at her. "You shouldn't leave laundry out overnight, dear, you know a bat will get tangled up in them."

Where was Leilan Tel? There was no sign of her, the blankets Thaoz had given her were hung up with the rest of the sheets she had hanging to block the view from the road. Had she left during the night before Aunt Tlalal had even showed up? Was she hiding? Did she think Tlalal was from the government, and Thaoz had called her over to capture Leilan Tel? Thaoz pulled at any threads of sense she could get out of herself. 

"It's not always easy for me to get up here," she said, because it was the only excuse she could think of, and besides it was true. "With my leg."

Aunt Tlalal's expression softened, just for a moment, and went firm again. "Oh, I _said_ we should have remodelled when you moved in, I'm sure I can hold that contractor to her quote, but you didn't want to."

Thaoz gave a helpless shrug. "I don't need to come up here much. And I can get the laundry now. It's not worth it — let's go downstairs again, all right?"

Aunt Tlalal looked over the roof again. "Ute-atl liked it up here the best, do you remember? Whenever I visited I would find him up here, watching the eclipse."

Thaoz sighed. She came to lean on the wall next to her aunt. Ute had been a hundred and fifty years younger than her, born after she'd already shipped out. She'd met him in person once and for the rest they'd known each other through recordings and messages from their parents. One time he'd sent the whole family a video message recorded up here, the sunset light getting in his eyes, making him grin and squint. That had been the first time she'd seen anything of this planet at all. Thaoz hadn't thought anything of it at the time, other than the vague satisfaction of seeing Ute happy, doing something with a long future ahead of him.

"Yeah," she said, finally.

Aunt Tlalal frowned at her around her tusks, long and straight like the women on Thaoz's mother's side had them. Thaoz's own were curved like her father's father's tusks — he hadn't sawed them off when he told everyone he was going to be a father like people usually did, and sometimes Thaoz would stumble across an image of him and be surprised that it wasn't _her_ in them, somehow, in pictures from half a millennium before she was born.

"He used to call every week," Aunt Tlalal said, her voice almost gentle. "He was so proud of his farm. He took pictures of every new chair and piece of equipment."

Thaoz nodded.

"From you, I get one message a month. I don't think you've made any changes to the buildings since you built your beasts their little hut, and that was years ago. I'm worried, Thaoz."

Thaoz didn't know what to do but shrug again. _An alien spy lost her magic and hid out on my roof and I don't care about the cops, I just don't want her to leave_ was clearly not the right answer.

"I'm trying branreed and red beans this year," she offered. "They seemed practical."

That didn't change Aunt Tlalal's expression at all.

A grown adult two hundred and twenty-odd years old, Legionary for a hundred and eighty of that, and she couldn't get her aunt not to worry about her. Emperor's eye.

Her aunt looked at her. "Do you like it here?" she asked, her voice steady. The question was nonsensical. What did it matter? But Aunt Tlalal just kept looking at her.

"The beasts like it," Thaoz said, striking out for the closest available reply. "They like — chasing the bats, and having the field to patrol instead of a ship."

Aunt Tlalal didn't answer, only looked around the roof, with its stacked crates and laundry lines and more leaves already trapped in the corners, even though Thaoz had swept it two days ago. She pushed herself away from the wall.

"Let's get that laundry in. It looks bone-dry," she said.

They brought the laundry downstairs and folded it together, and then Aunt Tlalal took over from Thaoz at the stove. Thaoz took the opportunity to plead her bladder and escape the kitchen. She locked the stairway door on her way for whatever good it would do now.

She splashed her face with water in the bathroom and stared at herself in the mirror. All the gears in her brain had ground to a halt. She'd handled her aunt badly. She didn't know where Leilan Tel was, and any of the possible options — in hiding, on the run again, convinced that Thaoz had turned her in — just made Thaoz's shoulders tense up.

"When did you get so bad at lying to your COs?" she asked herself, and went back out.

Aunt Tlalal was halfway through frying the patties, and the turnip greens sat drained and tossed with a seasoned oil she'd put in the care package — Thaoz could see the bottle standing on the counter.

Thaoz went in and got down plates from the cupboards. It was uncomfortable moving around her aunt in the kitchen, nothing at all like doing the same with Leilan Tel. The silence weighed differently.

She tried to ask questions about her aunt's work as they sat down to eat.

"I have an evening appointment in Filat Thod with a prospective buyer — they seem likely to put in a good order," Aunt Tlalal said, and flicked a fingertip against her cup to make the water inside ripple for luck.

"Are the samples in your engine? Won't they melt?"

"I've got a cooler, they'd be fine even if I broke down for two days," Aunt Tlalal assured her. She worked in candy manufacturing — most people who'd come to the colony in its early days had been focused on strictly practical goods, brickmakers and ironworkers and miners, and Aunt Tlalal had swooped in early to corner the market in _im_ practical goods. 

"We're marketing a new line, a little higher-end now people have the money saved up for it. Real honey, a little spot gloss on the packaging. And a small line at a higher price point, in purple, for people to _aspire_ to."

Thaoz nodded along. Aunt Tlalal conducted her marketing like a sergeant she'd had when she was deployed in Clipse space. Thaoz didn't doubt that Veran Atlan Confectionery Co would take over the entire Filat Thod middle-class market within two years.

Aunt Tlalal showed her a holo image of the new packaging, not wanting to risk her physical samples. The most expensive line had a embossed texture of wide triangles and a picture of a woman with an impressive set of tusks holding an overflowing basket. Just close enough to Councilmember Caiatl to evoke luxury, but different enough to avoid any kind of reprimand or suggestion that they thought Caiatl should step up to the corrupt position of Emperor, oh no, not when they had the Dominus and the Council keeping the Empire in line. Or at least, that was how Aunt Tlalal explained it, and Thaoz was grateful that that wasn't something she had to worry about.

Her aunt was explaining to her just how many revisions their legal team had pushed the artist to as she got settled back in her engine. Half the beasts had scattered to lie in the sun but the rest were still by the path, watching Thaoz and Tlalal.

"And listen, Thaoz-uthazim—" _oh, back to full names,_ Thaoz thought sourly "—the last few times I called it didn't go through to messaging, like you had your tablet not even on. You keep that thing on and charged now."

Thaoz grimaced. "I had to pull the battery out to fix something else."

"I will mail you batteries," her aunt said. "You don't have to answer every time. But I do expect to hear from you once a week. It can be a call. It can be a message. It can be a text saying _I'm still alive_ with a picture of that ancient beast Pax of yours if you want."

"It's Pask," Thaoz said. At the sound of his name the ancient beast in question came whuffing up to her and pressed his damp snout into the back of her knee.

"Well, tell me all about the voles he savages if you have to. But it isn't just me worrying, all right?" Aunt Tlalal's voice, always brisk, softened just a touch. "The family asks after you when I speak to them, and I'd like to be able to tell them you're doing well."

"I'm doing well," Thaoz said, and pulled a smile up from somewhere. "Good luck at the meeting."

"Luck is for children," Aunt Tlalal said dismissively, but tapped anyway at the charm dangling off her keys, a little vial of homeworld water. 

She drove off, her engine purring low, the antigrav shock absorbers high enough quality she didn't even kick up any dust on the road as she went. 

Thaoz sighed. Once she lost sight of the engine to a curve far down the road, she stepped back inside her yard and closed the little gate. She whistled _all calm, stand down_ to her beasts and saw the last of the nervous ones, the ones that didn't like any visitors, pace off back to their favourite napping spots.

Pask kept on leaning against her. She sat down on the low stone wall by the gate and rested a hand on his spine, flexing her leg to stretch it out in the late morning sun.

She stayed there for half an hour, thinking, making sure her aunt wouldn't circle back for any forgotten little items.

Thaoz had never been in intelligence, but she knew how to sweep for bugs, and she did so methodically as she cleaned up breakfast and then went to the linen closet for two clean sheets to soak, wring out, and bring up to the roof in a basket. She hung them up, blocking the view from the road again, and when she was sure that she was unwatched, she said to the empty roof,

"I don't know if you're still here. But if you are, then I'm sorry. I didn't know my aunt would visit today. She's gone now — to Filat Thod, on business. I didn't tell her about you."

Silence on the roof.

Thaoz added, feeling the words pulled out of her, "I'm sorry for yesterday too. You're right. I don't know what I'm doing. I made lentil patties for breakfast. If you're here I can bring some up to you."

She rubbed at her eyes, tired of herself and her inability to say anything right.

There was a creak behind her.

Thaoz turned around, and didn't see anything but the laundry and the crates of Ute's old things at first. Then the creak came again, and she saw the lid of a crate rise, pushed up by a long thin hand.

"Leilan Tel?" Thaoz asked, unable to believe it, not really knowing why.

The crate top slid off to the side and Leilan Tel's face rose up slow, Zulbia at her shoulder, eye light a dim glow.

"That's what I like about the Cabal," Leilan Tel said. "Nice hiding spots. There's a winter coat in here, so I figured it would be the coziest, but I did not expect the boots. Or the boots' smell."

Thaoz pressed her hands to her face and laughed, painfully. Into them, she said, "I thought you _left_."

She felt a touch on her elbow, and pulled her hands away to see — Leilan Tel in front of her, looking tired and solemn.

"I wouldn't leave without telling you first," she said, that warm hand still on Thaoz's arm. "We haven't finished fixing that combine yet."

Thaoz laughed again, and this time it felt better.

They didn't finish with the combine that day. Thaoz left the shed to walk the field rows, overdue for some weeding, and stayed out there till her hands hurt as much as her knee, the sun scraping the rim of the mountains in the distance. Work helped, usually, but Thaoz only wanted to be back in the shed, sitting in Leilan Tel's cool silence like a pond. But there was nothing left for her to do in the shed, and the weeding had to get done one way or another.

She gave up and walked her last armful of weeds over to the compost pile before going back to the shed. It got plenty of late-afternoon sun and most of the beasts were napping in piles, Laurg in place of honour on top of the biggest spool table, two others under her looking cowed. 

"What am I going to do with you?" she asked Laurg, who only slid her inner eyelids shut at her in response.

Thaoz checked before she came in, making sure nobody was looking. One of Go'il's farmbeasts roamed close to the edge of his field, a golden-brown shape visible in the green ripples of teff behind it. But no person. She went in.

"How's the work coming," she asked automatically, before even registering what she was seeing — Leilan Tel, pale and thin-lipped, wrestling with one arm at the block of the combine's engine.

Zulbia flared up bright on her entrance. " _Good_ ," they said. "Make her stop! She's going to strain something."

Thaoz took two steps in. 

"I just need to get the engine back into its mount, I'm not going to strain anything," said Leilan Tel, and Thaoz came and kneeled next to her to pull her hand away from the engine block as gently as she could. Both their hands were dirty, Thaoz's with soil and plant sap and Leilan Tel's with machine oil. There was a fine trembling in her hand; feeling it made Thaoz's throat hurt.

Leilan Tel sat there, staring at the engine, and burst out with, "I shouldn't strain anything. I should be able to lift this without even one hand. Zulbia, we're both trapped here in the dark, and we'll never get out."

Her hand clutched at Thaoz's. Thaoz laid her other hand on Leilan Tel's back.

"You'll make it home," Thaoz said, and had to watch as Leilan Tel's expression closed down, going flat. Not the still calm of water. Now it was a sheet of ice.

Leilan Tel disengaged from her hand.

"I'm sorry for bothering you. I'm only a little frustrated. It will pass."

"You're not, you're still healing," Thaoz said, and it overlapped with Zulbia's sharp "Cut the bullshit."

Thaoz stared at them. Their segments were akimbo, blue eye blazing. They went on to say more to Leilan Tel in their alien language, all choppy sounds and quicker vowels than Thaoz could make out. Leilan Tel protested a few times, but Zulbia just overrode her, charging on and flaring their eye for emphasis.

The ice over Leilan Tel's eyes cracked, traded in first for frustration and then something sadder.

Finally, she said something short that sounded like _ya_ and lowered her shoulders, setting her uninjured hand on the back of her neck under her curling hair.

"Zulbia says I should apologize for getting emotional at you," she said to Thaoz. She peered up from under her fine dark eyebrows. 

"Don't mistranslate me just because our host can't tell what we're saying," Zulbia chided her.

"It's fine. You had to spend the morning in a box because of my aunt, so I think we're even," Thaoz said. It was more than she would normally say, and she rubbed at her eyes, trying to push some sense into herself. "Let's go in and rest and we'll figure out the engine in the morning."

She lowered her hand. Leilan Tel raised hers. She touched Thaoz's cheek — a light, glancing touch, there and gone almost before Thaoz could feel it.

"You got some dirt there," she said.

"It's the weeding," Thaoz said, completely inane. A smile passed over Leilan Tel's face.

Thaoz forced herself up. It wasn't easy. The leg and the long day, she told herself. Not Leilan Tel next to her, knee resting against her thigh.

"Nobody's outside," she reported from the door. "Stay low and in front of me and we'll be fine."

Leilan Tel walked right out the door, letting Thaoz's bulk block her from any possible sightlines. She didn't make her own check before she went.

Trusting Thaoz.

Both of them washed up thoroughly before dinner — Leilan Tel came out of the bathroom with her hair damp and sticking to her neck, and she looked even more like an athlete like that, taking a few practice laps before getting back into competition.

Could her kind of alien swim? Psions didn't. How buoyant could they be?

Thaoz snorted at herself for the thought, in the privacy of her bedroom, and went out to rustle up a meal. She kept it simple, all leftovers. She couldn't deal with the thought of cooking again today.

She didn't touch the greens. But Leilan Tel ate them, and so did Pask, sniffing for treats.

After they ate Thaoz shooed Pask back out to the garden, and she and Leilan Tel went up to the roof to take a look at Leilan Tel's arm under its bandages.

It wasn't swollen any more, but it also clearly still hurt for her to move. 

"If it were me I'd keep the splint on for a month," Thaoz told her. "But I've got no idea how fast humans heal."

Leilan Tel shrugged with her good shoulder. "Me either, unfortunately. Zulbia, you sure you don't know?"

"I didn't bring a medical database with us when we came here, no. But a month is a long time."

It would be safest for Thaoz to get Leilan Tel on her way as fast as possible. But the thought of her injured and on the run with only her Dead Person for company… wasn't a good one. And, selfishly, neither was the thought of her own house empty again.

Thaoz frowned down at the clean bandage she was wrapping around the splint on Leilan Tel's arm. It wasn't safe to ask her to stay, and it wasn't safe to tell her to go. Instead of saying anything, Thaoz just made sure the bandage wouldn't come undone, pinning its end neatly in place.

"Thanks," Leilan Tel said, quietly, and reached to feel how the splint sat. Her hand rested on Thaoz's for a moment till Thaoz came to herself and pulled her hand away.

Leilan Tel looked up at Zulbia and the two of them developed the expressions they got when they were talking to each other silently, in their minds. Thaoz let them talk and packed up her first aid kit, dropping the old bandages into a bag for later washing and disinfecting.

Zulbia and Leilan Tel broke away from each other to look at Thaoz, both of them with an uncomfortably clear gaze.

"It's not right for us to keep putting you in danger," Leilan Tel began, close enough to Thaoz's line of thought to make her startle.

"She's not healed, but we are well enough to make it to our safehouse. A solid week of rest is more than enough for us, light or no." Zulbia's little triangle pieces were held still, close to their core. 

"If you want us to go—" Leilan Tel said, spreading her hands in an invitation to dismiss them both, and Thaoz had to clench her own on the handle of the first aid kit to keep from grabbing them.

"I won't stop you if you want to. But I meant what I said about the bats out there. They eat things bigger than you." Thaoz stared down at her white-knuckle grip on the kit.

None of them said anything for a long moment, stretched out and gone elastic.

"Split the difference, give it another week?" Zulbia suggested. 

Thaoz sighed with relief she hadn't expected to feel. Leilan Tel was still frowning, though, and said, "Thaoz will be in danger, though."

Thaoz made herself shrug in a casual way. "There's always danger. Stay as long as you want."

 _Stay a lifetime_ , she thought, ridiculously, and bit her lip to keep it from spilling out. 

"I'll have to go into Karch again in the next few days," she added, hiding in practicality. "I can pick up anything you might need for the last leg of your trip."

Leilan Tel smiled at her. It felt like the sun coming out of eclipse, always warm enough to be a surprise after the cold dark.

"Thank you," she said, and laid her good hand over Thaoz's on the kit. Her nails were clear of the day's grime. There was a freckle on the side of her little finger, the extra one just like a psion's.

Thaoz tore her eyes away from it back to Leilan Tel's face. She tried a smile of her own, and couldn't tell what it looked like.

"How about you tell me how it's going with that engine?" she asked, not knowing what else to say. "Do we need to order in a new capacitor in the end?"

They sat there and talked together about the engine and other things that didn't matter till the sun went down, chased away by the moons.

— 

The next day they got the engine back into the combine, Thaoz shifting it into position under Leilan Tel's guidance and Zulbia's occasional interference. They turned it on and it made an encouraging humming sound right up till Thaoz tried out its antigrav field on a handful of nails and it tried pulling down the shelves right on their heads.

Thaoz slapped the off button frantically, and Leilan Tel just sat there on her tarp, sleeves rolled up to her elbows and arms smeared in engine grease up to her sleeves, laughing.

The last jar on one shelf slowed its wobbling and stopped, and Thaoz huffed out a breath in relief. Then she looked down at Leilan Tel, still laughing, and started to laugh herself.

Leilan Tel wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand. "Looks like that wasn't it."

"Looks like," Thaoz echoed. "It was not doing that last year. Next time I'm testing this thing outside away from all the breakables."

"Good idea," Leilan Tel said, and stretched. She had on one of Thaoz's shirts layered over her black underlayers like a jacket, deep blue and shot through with sunset-pink threads, oversized on her. Thaoz stopped herself from reaching to fix how the collar was sitting.

"I'm going to run it through boot a few times, let it go through its startup cycle and diagnostics. Sometimes that shakes things loose."

"That's what we had to do when we were putting in supply requests on the _Ualac Celeris_ ," said Thaoz, remembering all of a sudden. "One Sand Eater I know put in a request for six thousand yards of heavy-grade canvas once because the console got stuck in a loop and kept sending in the same form."

"Did he get them?"

"He did." Thaoz shook her head. "Tolok always had the worst luck — the quartermaster told him if he wanted it so badly he could deal with storing it himself. We climbed over that canvas to get to our bunks for weeks before he got rid of it. I think he ended up burying it out in the desert in the middle of the night."

The combine made a humming noise. Leilan Tel bent back towards its control panel. "I've heard of Guardians digging up some strange things on Mars, but never a load of Cabal fabric. The wind uncovers things every once in a while — maybe it'll turn up again sometime."

"Hopefully not till Quartermaster Thon's redeployed somewhere else." Saying that, Thaoz remembered he was probably dead and buried in those same sands now too, along with everyone else she'd known in the Eaters. Her hands twisted in her lap.

Leilan Tel slapped the side of the combine. Thaoz looked up to see her looking satisfied.

"I think that did it. Let's give this thing another try."

Thaoz had to haul it outside before turning on the antigrav — and that was the problem with relying on grav tech so much, wasn't it, if when it broke you didn't have a nice simple set of wheels as backup. She used the tarp as a sledge.

Leilan Tel hung back in the shed but a handful of the beasts came up to sniff around the machine, Tlu'ar circling it like she wanted to jump on top of it.

Thaoz nudged her away with a foot. This time she set the combine to affect the pebbles all over this part of the yard. She held her breath as she pushed the button to confirm.

The combine blinked on, warm orange lights lighting up its sides, and hauled itself a few inches into the air. The tenor of its humming changed and — Thaoz let out her breath — it started pulling pebbles up from the ground, shuttling them around to where the catch-bag would go once Thaoz clipped it in. For now the pebbles just came falling in a little pattering rain out its back end.

She circled around to its front and pulled it around by its engine-hitch, just one round across the yard. Tlu'ar came sniffing too close and got a noseful of rocks for her trouble. They didn't hurt anything but her dignity — those scales could and had turned away throwing knives. Still, she whined.

"You baby," Thaoz said, but fondly. She brought the combine to rest against the side of the shed and turned it off. It went dim and lowered itself to the ground, ready for when she'd need it again.

Back in the shed, she couldn't help but grin at Leilan Tel. "You did it!" she said. "It works. You're a miracle worker."

Leilan Tel looked at her from the stack of boxes she was perched on now, Zulbia nestled into her collar. Her opaque expression flashed to something new and equally unreadable — wide eyes, a softening in her mouth.

Thaoz hung there in the doorway, trapped by Leila Tel's look. It seemed like forever before she said, "All part of the service. Is it a fair trade, do you think, our lives for a functional combine harvester?"

 _Those were free_ , Thaoz didn't say. _A trade like that wouldn't mean anything._

But she smiled back, accepting the joke. And she came in, and shut the door behind her to be safe.

—

They always seemed to end their day on the roof, sitting next to each other on the concrete. Thaoz brought up a rug halfway through the week to soften the ground and that clinched it — habit became tradition. Thaoz would keep her hands busy with a little something that needed mending and they would watch the sunset between the linens hanging on the lines.

"So," Leilan Tel said one evening, looking up from her own work of polishing all of Zulbia's little segments. "Do you have plans for everything in that storage shed of yours?"

Thaoz glanced over at her. She had spent the day in the field today, splitting her time between farmwork and some training for the beasts, so Leilan Tel had been alone most of the day in the shed with Zulbia. 

"Not really," Thaoz answered. "Some things, maybe. But most of it's there just in case it's useful when something breaks half a year from now."

"I was curious about all the fencing wire— there's a lot of it."

Thaoz shrugged. "It was here when I inherited the farm. Hasn't been useful yet." That didn't seem like enough somehow, so she added, "Could be Ute was planning on getting some chickens. It's the right grade for a coop."

Zulbia wiggled sleepily in Leilan Tel's lap, their pieces sprawled out across its surface. Leilan Tel set a hand over them. "You could get chickens."

Honestly, she answered, "I never thought about it."

Her aunt had been right. Thaoz never thought of adding anything to the farm unless it was urgently needed, like the warbeasts' area.

When she'd first come to this world, stepping off the transport dazed by the feeling of walking around without a pressure suit, leaving gravity to itself, she had made a to-do list like a medic performing triage. The garden and fields had been overgrown, one window on the house leaking. It had been long months to make the place first livable and then fruitful. The work had kept her going, hard labour that didn't need her mind as much as her back and hands, and by the time she'd brought the farm back to how it had been in Ute's videos she'd settled into a rhythm and got something like her mind back. But she had never thought of expanding it beyond what seemed immediately useful. Like a low-ranking officer keeping a firebase going without the authority to order changes in the schedule.

"Might be nice, if you could keep your warbeasts off them," Zulbia said. Their voice buzzed sleepily.

"Build the hutch first and give them some training to keep off it for a few days before I picked up any chickens, that's the easy part," Thaoz said automatically. "I wouldn't give them the temptation of loose animals running around their yard, but even the troublemakers won't tear through a cage I've taught them to leave alone."

Leilan Tel's eyes crinkled. 

"You know them like your own hand," she said.

Thaoz didn't know what to say to that. Now that the thought was in her head, she couldn't put aside the idea of — expanding the farm. Keeping chickens. It was like Leilan Tel had pushed through a wall in her mind, some old rotting thing that just needed a weight leaned on it to make it collapse. And there was the sky outside, just waiting to come in.

"Chickens could be good," she said finally. She made her hands start moving again on her work, a kitchen towel with a ragged edge that needed stitching up. It was soft blue and well-worn; a few more months would see it to the shelf of rags she kept for the warbeasts' worst messes. "I'll… think about it."

Leilan Tel nodded. Their companionable silence returned, now a little fuller with everything on Thaoz's mind.

—

The week passed and stretched out, and neither brought up the idea of Leilan Tel leaving again. It was a gap in their conversations they didn't have a hard time filling — it was easy to talk to her, easy as pulling a bucket of water up from the well. 

Leilan Tel told her more stories about her home and her time out in the field, though she didn't phrase it like that. Her people seemed to convince themselves they weren't really military, which seemed funny to Thaoz, considering how much trouble the Eaters had had with them.

One afternoon they sat up on the roof, Thaoz shelling a basket of early peas from the kitchen garden and Leilan Tel stitching up a rip in her long black undershirt, wearing Thaoz's blue shirt over an even smaller black shirt that left her belly bare. Thaoz kept her eyes on the peas.

"It's more like a bundle of guerillas, and only half of them take orders even sometimes," she said, trying to explain, waving her hands in a way that didn't really help.

"How do you get anything done?"

"Most of us share a goal, and we've all got the same home, I suppose," she said, and a shadow passed over her face like the dark shape that rippled over the surface of water when a crocodile was passing deep below.

"I don't envy whoever's got the job of herding all of you," Thaoz said, by way of distracting her. 

The thought of the Dominnus' march on Leilan Tel's homeworld never left her for very long, her firsthand knowledge of the pace of military progress giving her mental images of the tower of Leilan Tel's stories harried, bombed out, all the wizards hunted down and civilians under curfew, mines well into production by now.

Leilan Tel did laugh then. "I wouldn't take the job for all the money in Torobe," she said, and Thaoz startled a little.

"I keep forgetting they renamed it," she said ruefully. "One day I'm going to say _Torobatl_ in front of the wrong person and get the Council's soldiers after me."

The Old Emperor's daughter had been behind the renaming of the Empire's capital city, stripping out the word-ending of glory and respect he'd given it along with all the gold on the statues. The news reports from Torobe these days looked properly military, and so did Councilmember Caiatl in her pressure armour simulating the gravity of the same planet she lived on. 

"Oh, they won't come for you for saying the wrong name for the capital," Leilan Tel assured her. "Just don't say anything about wanting Calus back in public. Or even around too much technology."

Her tablet was still shut off in her closet with its battery in Leilan Tel's eerie psion mask. Thaoz was suddenly grateful for that.

She did feel the need to clarify something, though. "I _don't_ want him back, not really," Thaoz said. She flicked a line of peas from inside their shell into the waiting bowl. "I don't remember much about politics from before I shipped out but from what I do, it doesn't sound like he was any different but for the colour of the paint he used on all his statues."

Leilan Tel put her sewing down in her lap and propped her head on her good hand, looking up at Thaoz. "No admiration for the man who gave you your citizenship back?"

Thaoz shrugged, uncomfortable. How was she supposed to say _he only did it to look benevolent, he didn't change conditions for the military at all and citizenship or not, people still don't make it to retirement_ , or _I didn't want it, I didn't want to come back, they could have buried me out by Tolok's damn canvas and I'd have thanked them for it_?

Probably she could say just that, and Leilan Tel would nod and absorb it and return some story about her impossible tower. The realization swept over Thaoz all at once, like the storms that came here in the winter, a mass of clouds sweeping through a clear sky and moving on again within the hour, leaving you soaked and still surprised.

Leilan Tel nudged her knee against Thaoz's when she didn't say anything. She left her leg there pressing against Thaoz, warm and slight.

Thaoz cleared her throat. "It's all politics," she said, half apologetic. "You can't do anything about it. You just have to live with it."

"No thought of getting into local government? Change things from the inside?" Leilan Tel raised her eyebrows, clearly teasing, and Thaoz snorted a laugh.

"You're a worse spy than I thought if you think even the colony governor gets to do more than decide where to put the new rail lines," she said. "Hard odds, I've done any number of times. Impossible odds are for emperors and wizards."

Leilan Tel, as the farm's resident wizard, gave a little bow. Her shirt gaped open. Thaoz looked back at the peas in her hand. She'd worried a shell half into pulp with a thumbnail.

Thaoz put the shell into the discards basket and got up. She went over to the edge of the roof, leaning on the low wall to look into the field. The branreed was getting tall and dark and the long red shapes of the warbeasts stood out among it. She counted most of them, in their usual late-afternoon spots, sunning themselves or scratching at the block of feldspar she kept next to the shed for them to sharpen their claws on.

They should be starting to meander over to the well for Thaoz to give them their dinner and to top up their water. Usually Laurg was the first one there, distinctive with the sign of her old regiment scarred dark into her back instead of into her haunch where it typically sat. But she wasn't visible anywhere, not even as a rippling movement in the branreed.

She'd been acting oddly for weeks, more than just her jockeying for position among the other beasts, or getting used to Thaoz's training style. If she'd run off…

Not worth thinking about yet. Thaoz came back to Leilan Tel. "I've got to go hunt down one of the beasts," she said, apologetic. "I know we're not done here, but I'll come back."

Leilan Tel tipped her head back against the wall. "No worries," she said, and held up her sewing. "I'll be here for a while yet."

It was abruptly weird to look at her, sitting on the roof just as she'd been when Thaoz had first found her. She'd been hurt, curled up in on herself, and now she was relaxed, legs sprawled out, her skin a much more healthy, vivid colour. She still had an arm splinted and winced whenever she forgot to only shrug with one shoulder, but she looked so much _better_ objectively that it made Thaoz feel lightheaded and all clogged up inside at the same time. 

Thaoz offered up a smile and went down.

In the yard, she gave her whistle for attention, the piercing _return to leader, wait for orders_ that she knew could be heard well past the edges of her field. One of Go'il's spouses had told her so once.

Beasts came streaming in from all around. When they all sat at attention in front of her, Thaoz looked them over and counted them. Fifteen — missing one. Missing Laurg.

She folded her arms and gave the whistle again. Zu'uarc, a smallish male that had come to her a year ago from an old trainee's new commander, edged forward and whined. Thaoz could almost hear his question: _we're here, why are you yelling at us?_

Nothing. Thaoz sighed. One last command: _Find the missing, report back_. She held the last note a long time, letting it waver up and down in emphasis.

The beasts streamed off again, the tide retreating, and Thaoz rubbed at her eyes. She thought she'd had a handle on Laurg, was making a dent in the bad training she'd come in with. But if she couldn't be trusted to not leave the farm, she couldn't be trusted to not kill any animal or even person she came across. Thaoz would have to put her down, and then she'd likely have to put down the others for the sake of the local civilians' fear.

The beasts came back before she could go too far down that dark road. Fast enough that Laurg was, probably, still on the farm — just not coming to call? Was she injured, then?

Thaoz stumped grimly after the beasts as fast as her leg would let her. They brought her to the edge of her field, near the irrigation tank, where a low wall separated her field from Go'il's.

She saw his farmbeast before she saw Laurg, sitting on top of the wall, its shoulders up in a defensive display that was about as threatening to her beasts as a plank of wood. Or to her, for that matter. 

Erroz and Tlu'ar flanked Thaoz, guiding her behind the tank itself, where there should have been a stand of weeds that Thaoz never quite got around to dealing with.

Instead, there was Laurg, curled in a shallow pit she'd dug under the weeds, their torn-up stalks making a cushion for the five eggs she had wrapped her whole body around.

"Oh no," Thaoz said out loud, in real dismay. "Laurg, what did you do?"

She should have been spayed before she ever got to Thaoz. Go'il should have done something about _his_ beast. 

Thaoz sank blindly down onto the wall next to the farmbeast. He growled at her. She put her hand over his head, pinching the hinge of his jaw lightly — it made them drop open, catching more of her scent, accepting her presence. The theorists said that since warbeasts dropped their jaws around superiors, making them do it triggered some kind of connection there, and they would accept you as their superior.

The beast huffed but settled down. She hadn't known it would work for a breed as domesticated as theirs.

Thaoz rubbed at her face. Five eggs. _Five_ eggs, of some whole new crossbreed, and who knew how they'd take to training? She didn't have time for five warbeast pups.

She whistled a dismissal to the fifteen of her beasts who weren't guarding a clutch and fumbled in her pockets for calcium chips. She tossed a handful to Laurg, who would need them after laying five — _five_ — eggs.

Laurg would stay with the nest until her eggs hatched, at which point she would get them their first meal and then abandon them, parental instincts satisfied. 

"You're getting your meals delivery for the next while, then," Thaoz said to her, and got up.

Back at the house, Leilan Tel stared at her. 

"I was not expecting that," she said. " _Five?_ "

"Five," Thaoz confirmed. She thumped the basket of empty pea shells down on the kitchen counter, ready to go to the compost pile. "She should have been spayed. I knew her trainer wasn't worth the cost of his suit's pressure gel, but this is ridiculous."

"Are you going to keep them all?" It was a sensible question. It still made Thaoz's heart hurt.

"If I can. If I can train them. I don't know what having a farmbeast sire will do for their instincts, and it's not safe for them or anyone around if they don't respond to training."

Leilan Tel nodded, sitting at the table and fully clothed again in her repaired shirt.

"Oh," said Thaoz, realizing something. "We may as well get those chickens after all."

"Well, I approve, but why now?"

Thaoz gestured with her ladle. "Fresh meat and raw eggs; they're good for beasts when they're just hatched. They grow better for it."

Now that it was more than a thought, Thaoz was already building a picture in her mind of where she could install a hutch. Maybe an enclosure at the side of the house, starting at the little junction of ground between the porch and the steps and wrapping around the corner to give them some extra space for exercise. In the winter she could give them some insulation, a small heater. There was a big one in the shed for the warbeasts to huddle around when the rains started — no reason the manufacturer wouldn't have a smaller model.

She told Leilan Tel what she was thinking and got a nod in return. "That does sound good. Do you think there's enough of that wire fencing in the shed?"

"Should be." It felt good, planning something together with Leilan Tel. 

"And," Thaoz added, "once we have their enclosure, we may as well just get more after, to make up for whatever the hatchlings eat."

"Oh, of course. It's just practical." Leilan Tel was laughing at her. Thaoz could see it in the way her eyes gleamed.

"Now you're getting it," Thaoz told her, mock-solemn, and turned back to the stove to hide her smile.

—

Thaoz went down to Karch with the engine for once to pick up the chickens and all the gear she'd need for them. It made a pile in the trailer, the heavy bags of feed and grit and a scattering of smaller things, dishes and nest boxes and a little bag of desiccated beetles for treats.

Every time she passed the end of her field she checked on Laurg's eggs, knowing every time Laurg wouldn't want her there. She almost couldn't help it. They were hardening well — it wouldn't be much longer till they hatched. How she hadn't spotted them earlier, Thaoz had no idea.

She shook her head at Laurg from over the wall. Distracted, she'd been, and look what she was dealing with now because of it.

Thaoz felt antsy the whole time she was in town. Even the usual warm sawdust smell of the hardware store didn't help; she was always aware of everyone around and of how long she was taking. 

Sixteen beasts she'd trained as well as she could. They'd put up a warning howl if anyone came by, and Leilan Tel was quick and smart and could keep herself out of sight, even if one of the vintners came by angling to check on her gourds and get a jump on their rivals. Which they _wouldn't_ , Thaoz reminded herself, they wouldn't start coming by till much closer to harvest. Then they'd come with their samples and sniff at her gourds and make decisions on which kind of clay to grind the gourds down with to thicken the wine. They always changed their minds when the harvest came in, but they seemed to like bickering over grades of porcelain.

She was still staring at a display of calcium supplements. She frowned down at them and picked one up to check the labels. All the same ingredients and processing as the chips she got for the beasts. She could just crumble up those into smaller pieces for the chickens and save herself the purchase.

It was a relief to make a simple decision. She went to pay.

Arrox at the counter smiled at her. Her tusks were lightly scrimshawed, the patterns filled in with green dye this week. "So you're expanding! I was wondering if you were planning to."

"You were?"

"Three years of the same things every time you came, and then this year — triple your normal seed order. It's good to see you settling in!"

Thaoz was at a loss. She gave herself time to dig her wallet out of her pockets and then said, "It is good. I'm glad."

Now that she said it, she saw it was true. She was.

"Maybe in a few years you'll be selling eggs back to the town," Arrox suggested. Thaoz gave that the polite laugh it deserved and went out, arms and head full.

She went to the chicken farmer last after tying down the results of all her other errands into the trailer. One small package got tucked into the dashboard compartment of the engine itself — a fine cotton scarf in a shifting blue-green, that she saw at one of the weavers' stalls. It wasn't the kind of thing she'd buy for herself at all, but it was there in a soft pile at the stall and Thaoz saw it and thought, helplessly, of it draped around Leilan Tel's thin shoulders. So she bought it.

The chicken farmer gave her a list of warnings as long as anything she'd ever gotten from Quartermaster Thon, but Thaoz listened carefully, committing it all to memory.

He finished with a series of warnings about the chickens' poison spurs. "Wear gloves when you handle them, and remember to pull the glands out if you cook any, or you'll have one hell of a week," he said.

Thaoz looked down. He was holding a chicken. And not wearing any gloves.

"Oh, you have to know how to talk with 'em."

"I'll learn," Thaoz said, and meant it, but still she put on her gardening gloves before she accepted the wire cage. The chickens looked at her with their little bullet-shaped heads cocked, ruffling their elongated scales at her. One of them scraped a foot against the cage's floor, showing off the spur on the back of its leg.

The cage got set on top of the trailer, strapped in as securely as possible.

The horrible little reptiles screamed at her the whole way home. Thaoz was already thinking of names for them.

She let them into the new hutch as soon as she got through the garden gate. The warbeasts hovered back at the path, keeping clear of the hutch like she'd trained them too, and she gave them an approving whistle for it.

Pask approached once she stepped away from the hutch, pushing his massive blunt head into her side. Thaoz let her hand fall to his jaw. They went up the porch stairs together.

Thaoz didn't knock before going in — it would look funny to anyone watching. She did call out as she went in, though, letting Leilan Tel and Zulbia know she was home.

She stopped in the kitchen doorway. Leilan Tel was in the kitchen. But she wasn't at the table, or at the counter, or even wrestling with the sink pipes again. She was _on_ the counter, standing on tiptoe to reach a bowl on the top shelf of a cupboard. She was a full foot shy of the height necessary, and Thaoz could just see the gears turn in her head and Leilan Tel about to try to haul herself up to the shelf one-handed.

Thaoz leaned against the doorway and laughed. 

Leilan Tel turned around in a scramble, somehow not losing her footing. Her face went dull red. "Welcome home."

Thaoz knuckled at a corner of her eye. She pushed herself off the doorway and came into the kitchen properly. A full morning of errands and travel and it had all flown out of her head the second she'd come in.

"What are you doing up there?"

Leilan Tel grimaced. "Nothing smart." She looked down, assessing the jump back down to the floor.

Thaoz saved her from jarring her still-setting bones by just picking her up to lift her back down to the ground.

Leilan Tel's hands came up to grip Thaoz's arms as Thaoz swung her down. The look on her face made Thaoz stall out halfway through the action, leaving them staring at one another, the moment hanging in the air like dust in a sunbeam.

Then Leilan Tel bit her lip, and Thaoz's leg gave her a warning twinge, so she put her down, and it ended. Leilan Tel laughed, light, almost like her normal self.

"Thanks for the rescue."

"Anytime." 

Thaoz pulled herself away, abrupt, and said, "I picked up the chickens. If you want to come see."

Leilan Tel followed her out the door as soon as Thaoz checked the road was clear — the wall and the block of the engine itself would keep Leilan Tel out of sight as long as she stayed crouched.

"Oh," she said, looking at them. "So that's what they look like in person."

"What were you expecting?" Thaoz sat herself down on a porch step to stretch out her leg. Pask, joined by Erroz looking for company and a scratch on the haunch, sat on either side of her. 

Leilan Tel, crouched by the engine, put her hands on her hips. "Something fluffier, though now that I think about it, that wasn't ever going to be realistic on an Empire planet."

Thaoz tried to picture a fluffy chicken. She offered, "I think the Rrhen have soft chickens. They shave them for wool."

"It was definitely a mistake, focusing on ship movements and military tech. Chalco would have laughed herself sick if I sent a picture of a woolly chicken in with my reports."

Chalco was a name that had come up a time or two; Thaoz got the impression of a coworker Leilan Tel liked and respected, and also the impression that prying more would be cruel. How long since Leilan Tel had heard from her home? She couldn't know if the coworkers she liked were still alive to get her reports.

Tlu'ar and Mennen came slinking up to join their sister on the porch. Thaoz gave them each a pat.

Leilan Tel looked at her and laughed.

"What?"

"You look like a painting. _Young Farmer in Repose_." She gestured to Thaoz, surrounded by warbeasts, a hutch full of chickens still making their unhappiness known to her right.

Thaoz snorted. "Young? I don't know what you're fishing for, but you aren't going to catch it."

Leilan Tel lowered herself to sit against the engine's side. "Any farmer who isn't a thousand years old with skin as thick as an interceptor's plating counts as young."

Thaoz thought about most of the other farmers she knew. They skewed young on the colony planets, but there was definitely a tendency towards grizzle.

"How old are you? You've talked about three deployments that I remember, but that could be any number of years."

Two weeks ago, Thaoz would have thought that was a spy's question. Last week, she still would have frowned and changed the subject. Now, she just tipped her head back to feel the sun on her cheeks, and answered.

"Six deployments. A hundred eighty-two years with the Legions all together. I'll be two hundred and twenty-seven this winter."

Leilan Tel's shoulders shifted. She looked interested. "That's nearly my age! I'm two hundred and fifty-three, if I haven't hit my birthday yet."

From their invisible pocket of space, Zulbia said, "No, not yet. Another three local months."

"They're as good as an atomic clock." She sounded fond.

Zulbia shimmered into real space. "I have to be," they confided to Thaoz. "Do you know how long I looked for her before she was born? I'm not losing track now I've got her."

That made no sense at all to Thaoz, but she still smiled. Zulbia wandered on over to the chicken hutch, flying in their meandering way. One of the chickens, the biggest green one, hissed at them. Thaoz made a mental note to butcher at least one of them and pack it away so it would be ready when Laurg's eggs hatched. Might as well be the big one.

Tlu'ar butted at her thigh, complaining silently about how she'd stopped petting her. The feeling brought Thaoz back to herself.

"Oh," she said — she had actually forgotten. She got up, feeling clumsy now. "I picked up something for you down in Karch."

She had to lean around Leilan Tel to get into the engine's glove compartment. The package was done up in plain paper, sealed with just a bit of tape. Should she have asked for something fancier? Would that have just made it strange?

Leilan Tel slid the package open delicately. The scarf puddled in her hands.

Thaoz had been right. It did look good on her, the ocean colour against the light brown of her skin and her dark grey eyes.

"It just seemed…"

"Practical?" Leilan Tel offered, a smile tucked into the corner of a cheek.

That wasn't it. This felt too big to sidestep, but Thaoz didn't know how to come at it face-on. Three years away from the Legions and one unexpected wizard and she'd lost all her soldierly instincts. She didn't miss them. 

"It just seemed nice," Thaoz said, finally.

Leilan Tel's smile grew. Not wider, but it spread to her eyes, and it pulled at the shape of her nose. It had been so impossibly weird to see her unmasked at first, not looking anything like Thaoz was used to. Now she looked right. Exactly herself, and therefore perfect, running her hands over the new scarf.

"It is," Leilan Tel said. Her voice was soft. It did something to Thaoz's heart, hearing it like that. "It is nice."

—

Her little engine was hooked up to the combine for an experimental pass over the kitchen garden, so Thaoz walked down to Karch the next week with a shopping list full of little things to pick up before the eggs hatched and occupied all her time — more calcium chips, a pack of 3/8 screws, something interesting for dinner if anything caught her eye.

She came back at nearly a run, hip screaming, after Arrox at the hardware store gave her a funny look when Thaoz came in, and said, "I thought you'd be laying low for a while."

"Why?"

"Didn't you see the news?" she'd said. "Council's expecting the Dominus back home soon. They're sending out squads to clear out any last — _pockets of sympathy for the Old Emperor_ — that's how they put it. Thought you'd be home looking as harmless and patriotic as possible. Have you not heard?"

Thaoz's hand had gone up to her mouth. "My tablet's been broken for a month, I haven't seen the news since last time I came in."

Arrox shook her head. "If they ask, I haven't seen you. But you better go."

"Thanks," Thaoz said — choked out — grateful for that, at least.

A Council squad wouldn't be so easily put off as her aunt. They might decide an ex-legionnaire who benefited from the Old Emperor's laws wouldn't be loyal to the Dominus. They might decide to investigate the farmhouse. Leilan Tel wouldn't know what was coming.

She barreled back up the dirt road from Karch, passing the town's outskirts, then the fields, and when she got to Go'il's and nothing seemed wrong she could almost convince herself that they would be fine. 

Then she got to the edge of her field, half dragging the damn leg behind her, and heard the distinctive high yips of a pack of newborn warbeasts.

"Oh no," she said, and pulled herself over the wall to the irrigation tank. Laurg was in the nest-hollow with Go'il's beast, red around the chops and looking smug, and four little beasts were between them, tearing into a the body of a young bat, bellies swollen with meat. One last beast, half the size of its siblings, was still struggling out of its shell, its neck stretched out towards the meal it was missing.

Laurg would take off as soon as the four had finished eating and settled down, let them fend for themselves. She wouldn't bother with the runt. Thaoz had expected to spend three days with the hatchlings, hand-feeding them and getting them used to basic discipline.

"Oh _no_ ," she said again. This made things harder. But — she'd made do through harder. "Council squad's no Clipse windstorm," she told herself. It didn't help.

But she'd do what she had to.

First thing first: she pulled Go'il's beast closer to her and scrubbed the blood off his face with the edge of her sleeve, then put him back over the wall in his territory. He wouldn't understand her whistles, but he understood the sharp tap on his side — he took off, going home. She would have to have a talk with him about his beast. But only if she survived today.

Laurg hissed at her. Thaoz hissed back, then whistled, putting all her authority into it: _stand down_. 

There wasn't much left on the bat now but bones so she left it, and — half-mourning her clothes — untucked her shirt and held its edge out to make a little basket and popped each of the hatchlings into it, first the four big ones, then the little runt, easing it the rest of the way out its shell carefully. It slimed her whole front with egg in its wiggling, and its siblings got the rest of her shirt with the blood on their jaws.

 _Follow_ , she whistled to Laurg, and fast-walked through the field rows as quick as she could without jostling the beasts. She didn't stop at the garden but instead went right into the house, chivvying Laurg along into the kitchen with her.

She pulled two potholders and her apron down from a hook and tossed them to the ground, softening the stone floor, and kneeled to lay the hatchlings down in the makeshift little nest.

Instead of going down, the runt bit at her thumb, its teeth sharp little needles. It was barely the length of her hand.

Leilan Tel poked her head around the bathroom door, looking into the kitchen down the hallway. "You're home early," she said, surprised. "Have the eggs hatched?"

Thaoz looked up at her — small and lovely, half-dressed, in more of Thaoz's clothes she wore like they were tailored for her. It had been such a _bad_ idea to make her stay. But Thaoz realized that she'd been happy, that they both had been, playing at a life together. She bit her lip.

"Bad timing," Thaoz said, her voice rough. She gentled the runt off her thumb without looking at it, pressuring its jaws open and off her. "Got to town just in time to hear that the Council's going around cleaning up any loyalists they can find. Probably have me on a list. It's not safe — we have to go."

Leilan Tel bit at her own lip, but she nodded. "Would it be safer for you if Zulbia and I left by ourselves?"

"Maybe," Thaoz said, but then, surprising herself for what felt like the hundredth time this month, "but I'm not letting you. We'll go together, take the risk together. There's a good chance they'll kill me because it's simpler anyway, whether or not you're here. We'll take the engine and drive up to wherever your safehouse is, or as close as we can get. If they don't find me at home maybe they'll just give up."

Leilan Tel nodded again. "I'll get my gear, you get the engine?"

Thaoz felt a rush of emotion at that, one she couldn't name. Leilan Tel darted into the kitchen, light on her feet, and picked up Thaoz's hand in hers. The one with the little circle of bite marks on the thumb.

Leilan Tel raised it and pressed her lips to it. The tumble of her hair hid her face.

Thaoz's breath caught in her throat.

"Thank you," Leilan Tel said. "However this ends. Thank you for everything."

And she darted away just as quick again, up the stairs to the roof. 

Thaoz looked at her hand. Just one touch and it buzzed like she'd brushed against an exposed wire.

The runt whined at her. Its bigger siblings were settling down for a nap, making a bloody mess of her good apron, but it was still hungry.

There were two chickens in the cold storage, cut into pieces. Thaoz put one chicken's worth out on a plate on the floor, for when the big ones woke up again — they were all the colours of fire, she could notice now, one bright orange, one Laurg's deep garnet-red but with its scales edged in its father's gold, the other two patchy. The runt was nearly all red but for a pair of uneven socks on its back legs and a scatter of gold along its spine.

She put it on the table with a drumstick, left it to tear happily at the meat, and went outside for the engine.

Laurg followed her out, discharged of her own duty now her litter had had its first meal.

The engine was still hooked up to the combine waiting outside the shed. Thaoz pulled at the hitch, dragging it free with pure force. Her hands left blood smeared across the chassis.

The engine itself, she turned on without getting in, so she could guide it at her side up the path and out the garden gate. A few of the beasts whined at her, Pask especially. He could feel her agitation.

She took a breath and whistled to them, _stay low, stay hidden_. Pask looked at her reproachfully but went with the others to hide themselves in between the rows of gourds and branreed. They wouldn't come out now till Thaoz came back to countermand the order, and the plants were grown tall enough to hide them, which meant they were safe as possible from any trigger-happy Council soldier.

Unless they burned the field. Thaoz shuddered and put that image aside.

When she came back in the runt was busily choking itself on the chicken bone, trying to eat it end-first. Thaoz saved it from its own enthusiasm.

"You're going to be the death of somebody," she informed it. "Might be me. Might be you. I can see I'm going to have to keep an eye on you."

Leilan Tel came down the stairs in her psion costume — a strange sight after weeks of seeing her maskless. For a split second Thaoz thought there was a stranger in the house.

"How are we doing this?" Leilan Tel asked. Thaoz had forgotten how little the mask muffled her voice. She sounded perfectly normal.

"I'll drive, you'll give me directions. If anyone does show up, I'm delivering this—" she held up the runt. It curled up in her hands, ready for a nap "—to a farmer who wanted a better guard beast, and you're a contractor I'm giving a ride to. Sound good?"

Leilan Tel nodded. She settled her bag more securely on her shoulder. The scarf was looped around her shoulders and head over the mask, leaving her arms free. "Let's go."

Thaoz grabbed another piece of chicken for the runt, carried it in a little bowl along with the beast out to the engine. It was a one-seater, but she budged over on the bench to make room for Leilan Tel, who didn't need more than a quarter of a seat herself. 

"Can you hold this?" Thaoz needed both hands to drive. She dropped the bundle of warbeast into Leilan Tel's lap.

Leilan Tel brushed a gloved finger over its little snout. It caught on its eggtooth, translucent white against its red nose. The beast sneezed in its sleep, almost silently.

"Huh," Leilan Tel said, softly, before looking back up. "Alright," she added. "Down this road straight ten miles, and then we'll have to hook east."

Thaoz nodded, and they set off.

It was a grim, tense drive, somehow made worse by the weather. It was a beautiful summer morning with a bare cool breeze cutting the heat. Day moths meandered over the hedges. It could be the last day she saw any of them. 

Twenty miles down a curving set of roads, turned off onto a smaller one bumpy enough to give her little engine's antigrav unit a trial, Leilan Tel asked, "So when do you give names to your beasts?"

"Hm? Oh." Thaoz unset her teeth from her lip where they'd been wearing a groove. "When you decided which ones you're going to keep, usually. Legion's strict about beast-to-trainer ratios. Depending on recent casualties sometimes you'd only keep one or two out of a litter."

"You're not in the Legions any more," Leilan Tel pointed out, quiet.

For maybe the first time that thought was a relief. She _could_ keep all of them, even the runt, if they lived through today. She could train them to her voice, not to drugs and anger, if only they survived. Were the odds impossible or just long?

"In that case, any time we like," Thaoz said. "What's a good name for this one, do you think?"

She kept her eyes on the engine's readouts and her periphery. They hadn't seen anyone yet but a farmer off in the distance putting up a trellis, but that could change anytime. The Council's interceptors had better antigrav than anything but the biggest hauler trucks, and they ran silent. 

From inside Leilan Tel's bag, Zulbia said, "Sfenj. Chebakia. Qottab. Beignet."

Thaoz didn't get it, but Leilan Tel said, "You and your theme names." To Thaoz, she added, "They're all fried desserts. Just like _zulbia_."

Despite herself, Thaoz cracked a grin. "I would never have guessed that. Something more like _Killer_ , maybe. _Bandit. Anklebiter_."

Leilan Tel laughed, lightly, under her mask. Zulbia began to say, "I'm a complex person, _Thaoz-uthavim_ —" but cut themself off abruptly, the blue of their eye flaring up sudden and sharp.

Leilan Tel stiffened at the same time.

"Something wrong?" Thaoz asked warily. She checked the road behind them again. Still clear. But they were headed upslope now, into foothills, and it meant they were exposed in a way she didn't like. And once they passed over one rise they wouldn't be able to see clearly behind them.

Leilan Tel shook herself. "Nothing," she said. "It had to be nothing."

"Psychosomatic tricks," Zulbia said, grim, and both of them lapsed into silence. Thaoz let them.

They drove quietly till the engine, whining at a slope higher than it liked, woke up the beast in Leilan Tel's lap. It added its whine to the engine till Thaoz fumbled one-handed for the bowl of chicken and passed it to her right. 

"They're either eating or sleeping for most of their first week," she said, apologetic. "It'll calm down."

Leilan Tel nodded. The beast dove headfirst into its meal, and she ran a finger along its spine, petting it. It was the length of Thaoz's hand, which meant on Leilan Tel it sprawled nearly the full width of her lap. Funny how much bigger it looked like that.

They drove on, the sun rising. Even here in the hills it was getting hot — high summer now. Leilan Tel and Zulbia both stayed quiet but for occasional directions. Leilan Tel had the look of someone controlling herself tightly, the line of her shoulders taut. She leaned forward in her seat.

"Not far now," she finally said, quiet, but it overlapped from a voice booming behind them.

"Stop your engine, in the Council's name!" it said, amplified loud enough to make the beast in Leilan Tel's lap growl. 

"Oh, we're dead," Thaoz breathed. They couldn't outrun an interceptor. She cut the engine and turned around in her seat. 

The road behind them was blocked off by three interceptors, a whole little convoy in the red of the Dominus' legion. A centurion climbed out of the front one and came around to the driver's side of Thaoz's engine.

He consulted a tablet. It flickered through a series of pages till it landed on an image of Thaoz — her military portrait, flat-eyed and unsmiling and young.

"Thaoz Izorn, former beast-Val of the Sand Eaters?" he asked. She nodded. "And who's this?"

Leilan Tel leaned forward to look at him around Thaoz's bulk. "Shubat Enlil, sir. Tech-worker. Thaoz-uthavim was real kind to offer me a lift up to my next contract."

"ID?"

Thaoz silently accepted the bundle of warbeast from Leilan Tel as she dug through her bag. She came up with a chip that lit up yellow when the centurion tapped it against his tablet. Her mask's single eye was blinking rapidly. It looked like nerves, a little, but how was she doing it?

The centurion nodded and frowned. His eyes dropped to the beast. "And what's that?"

"Breeding experiment. Farmer up Ur Duluk way wanted something better at fending off crocodiles than a farmbeast but easier to manage than a warbeast."

"Well." He settled his stance. "Got no quarrel with you or the beast, Enlil, so you best stay right here. Izorn, ma'am, I'll have to ask you to step out of the engine."

Here it was, every nightmare she'd had for the last three years. "I'm loyal to the Dominus, sir," she said, as meek as she could make herself. "The Council let me keep my farm and my beasts. I gave two hundred years to the Empire in the Legions, and I'm grateful for the chance to give just as much to the colony effort."

The centurion frowned. She was making it harder for him to order her out and shot. How old was he? Could she convince him with a show of seniority?

"All the same, Izorn," he said, and his hand fell to his sidearm. "Step on down and we'll work this all out. For the good of the Empire."

Thaoz bit her lip: she knew what that meant. Her side was a wash of nerves, prickling up and down like static electricity. 

All this time, and she was only now realizing that she did want to live. She wanted to build her farm up, work it till it was _hers_ and the government couldn't take it away. She wanted to keep all Laurg's hatchlings. She wanted to wake up and see Leilan Tel sleepy in the kitchen, the morning sun turning the edges of her cloudlike hair brown and gold.

What a time to figure that out, right when she was about to die. It would have been nice to know it while she still halfway had it for a time.

She passed the beast back to Leilan Tel.

Who didn't accept it.

"No," Leilan Tel said. The breeze was gone. Her voice echoed like a stone dropped into a deep well.

Both Thaoz and the centurion turned to look at her.

" _No_ ," she said again, and now her voice crackled like lightning, an angry spear thrust into the ground.

She rose from the seat of the engine — not standing, but drawn into the air in a web of blue-white light that formed around her. She looked the most like a real psion she ever had. Like a flayer in their trance.

Light welled up in her fists, sharp and hard to look at. Thaoz covered the little beast's eyes with one hand automatically, but couldn't make herself look away.

"The one kind person on this planet. In this _Empire_ ," Leilan Tel said, voice throbbing and low. "And you'd kill her because it's easier. Because it's tidier. Because that way you don't have to look over your shoulder and wonder just how many centuries of being treated like she's not a person someone will go through before she decides to return the favour."

The centurion went for his gun. Leilan Tel's hands tightened on the light she held in them, and a beam cut through the air to hit him. It skimmed by Thaoz, purring as friendly as anything, before it hit the centurion and downed with with a crack like thunder right overhead.

The beam of light jumped from him to the soldiers in the convoy behind the centurion, one— two— three— four, and they were all down, in one single stuttering beat of Thaoz's heart.

Leilan Tel pulled the mask off her head and let it fall. Her hair escaped it like a stormcloud, floating around her, lit from underneath by the light still crawling up her arms from her hands. The scarf around her neck moved in her power like a piece of ocean pulled up into the sky.

She sank slowly back down to the ground. Thaoz stumbled out of the engine to meet her, leaving the little beast on the seat.

"The Light's back," she said, her grin incandescent. Her eyes were alive in a way Thaoz had never seen on her before. It took her breath away to see it. "That's what we were feeling on the road up here. Whatever the Dominus did to the Tower, it's undone. We're _back_."

Thaoz smiled back, helpless. "You made it through," she said.

"All thanks to you." Leilan Tel came closer, light enough on her feet she was dancing. She reached up with both hands and with no wince of pain laid them on Thaoz's. Then she — she didn't _jump_ , exactly, but boosted herself with her magic somehow so she was standing on air again, face level with Thaoz's. Like gravity didn't mean a thing to her. Thaoz's shirt, the blue one, fluttered open around her.

"We can make it look like they had an accident, well after they cleared you. Put you down as a harmless patriot, doing her duty for the Empire. Zulbia wasn't kidding. We're _very_ good at our jobs."

It was amazing how much her face was transformed now, her grin pushing at the shape of her cheeks, her grey eyes lit up with relief and magic.

She lifted Thaoz's hand to her lips again, despite all the dried blood on it. Thaoz shivered.

Leilan Tel dropped back down to the ground. "Come on," she said. "We're not far from the ship now."

Thaoz gathered up the warbeast from the engine in one hand, numbly, and let Leilan Tel take her by the other. She guided them off the road, down then up again another hill, till they were looking at a little depression between two rises, bare of anything but low scrub and rocks. No trees, even.

"You wait right here," Leilan Tel said, flashing another smile up at her, and skidded down the slope. She stopped at one rock, a little larger than the others, and Zulbia popped out of their little fold of space to let out their beam of light. It played over the empty space, rippling in inexplicable contour lines, and then, abruptly, there was a ship there.

A little alien craft, deep blue with backswept wings, big enough to hold one or two people Leilan Tel's size. It had a name picked out on the side of the fuselage in silver in a curling, unreadable script.

A ramp lowered from its belly. Leilan Tel and Zulbia disappeared into it.

Thaoz sat herself down on the slope, shivering despite the sun. She had to take the weight off her leg or she'd fall over and roll all the way down to Leilan Tel's ship. She held the little beast in her lap and soothed it till it went to sleep, curled up in a tight roll, its fat little tail draped over its nose. 

Would they go home now? If their home was safe now, maybe that was the best choice. Leilan Tel and Zulbia could start their ship and be home before the news of the Dominus' defeat reached the edge of Empire space. They could be home with their people and celebrate and mourn or do whatever their wizards did to mark the end of a war.

"I'm selfish," she said to the beast, quietly so as not to wake it up. "I just want them to stay."

She toyed with the idea of giving Leilan Tel the little beast. It shouldn't get much taller than her waist at its full height, if she was judging right from the scale of its paws, and that wasn't too big, was it? It would be like Leilan Tel had a piece of Thaoz with her when she went home.

Would she even want a warbeast? A farm-warbeast. Something new, a little bundle of unknown instincts that would need to be untangled as it grew. Thaoz ran a hand along its gold-speckled back. Its scales were soft, would take a week to get even a little hardness. She'd be scheduling the branding and IV shunt insertion surgeries right now if she were still on Mars.

"No branding for you," she said to it softly. Its tail twitched on its nose.

It felt like she sat there for hours with the little beast, but the sun hadn't traveled far across the sky before Leilan Tel and Zulbia came back out of their ship. They came back up the slope, Leilan Tel still beaming, Zulbia giving an airy swoop as they floated up behind her. Thaoz stood up to greet them.

"You wouldn't believe the number of messages I had waiting for me," Leilan Tel said. She was wearing a new coat, finally one sized to fit her, high-collared and with a long hem flaring out behind her, leaving her legs clear. A wide band glowed on her left arm. And she was still wearing the scarf Thaoz had given her, draped elegantly around her shoulders once and trailing down her back.

She'd been so — so _diminished_ , hiding in Thaoz's equipment shed, without her magic, waiting for death. Thaoz smiled helplessly down at her. She looked so good now. Thaoz wouldn't want her to come back if she'd lose all this life crackling through her now.

"Good news?" Thaoz asked.

"Mostly. Enough," Leilan Tel said. She looked away and back. 

The pause lasted long enough that the next thing she said, "Listen, I had a message from my Vanguard—" overlapped with Thaoz's pleading,

"If you're going, do you want to take Es'fenj with you?"

They both stopped and stared at each other.

Cautiously, Leilan Tel said, "Es'fenj?"

Thaoz held up her little bundle of snoozing beast. "One of Zulbia's suggestions."

Zulbia laughed, a chiming sound.

"Oh. Yes, but no," said Leilan Tel. "The message I had from my Vanguard — I'm going to stay right here in the Empire. Keep an eye on things."

"You don't want to go home?" Thaoz's heart was doing something erratic deep in her chest. Trying to make its way out to open air, maybe.

"Eventually I'll want a break, but here's where my work is." Leilan Tel smiled up at her. "Here's where you are."

She gathered up little Es'fenj from Thaoz's arms and put it on the ground to snooze on a patch of grass. She stepped closer to Thaoz.

"I told my boss at the shipyard when I took off that I had to go home to take care of a sick aunt," she said. "So I'll need another excuse next time when I want to actually visit home. I'll probably have to spend a decade building up his goodwill again before I can take another long break. He's really bad at the scheduling without me. But I bet I can manage him into letting me work from home at least part of the time."

Thaoz's heart was bruising itself against her ribcage. "Want to borrow my aunt, give your story a little realism?"

"From what I heard of her from under all those boots? No thank you," Leilan Tel said. She looked up at Thaoz. She was all clean, her coat tidy, her underlayers swapped out for fresh. Thaoz could feel the blood and egg remnants crusted on her own shirt.

"Everything else, though," she said, voice low, "I'll share as much with you as you'll let me."

Thaoz looked down at her. She felt dizzy. "All of it. Everything, if you'll come home," she said.

Leilan Tel stepped even closer into Thaoz's space. "Tell me if I'm overstepping," she began.

"You couldn't," Thaoz answered, and lifted Leilan Tel right up. She was a warm, solid weight in Thaoz's arms. 

Leilan Tel pulled Thaoz in by the shoulders and kissed her right there on that anonymous slope, Thaoz still a mess, Es'fenj snuffling behind them.

Thaoz didn't know if it was the kiss or the ripples of magic — of Light — still pulsing through Leilan Tel to her by all the points where they connected, but when they broke away she was shivering, the whole world vivid and sparkling.

She spun in a giddy circle, holding Leilan Tel, watching her eyes go crinkled with joy. They both dropped down to sit after, Thaoz on the slope, Leilan Tel in her lap.

"Home," said Leilan Tel, breathless, leaning against Thaoz's chest.

"Ours. Yours, as long as you want it," Thaoz said. She kissed the side of Leilan Tel's head, her ear, all she could reach. "You ever dream of living on a farm with — oh — twenty-one warbeasts and a retired legionary with a bum leg?"

Leilan Tel twisted in her arms, rising up on her knees and turning to face Thaoz again. She ran a hand along Thaoz's tusk. Those kind clever hands of hers, with such power tucked away in them.

"I think you showed me how to dream again," she said to Thaoz, and leaned in for one more kiss.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks due to Tanya and Gil for the early reading, to everyone else who tolerated my months-long honking about my sad walrus butch and her wizard girlfriend, and to the Mountain Goats for [the lyric I stole to title this fic](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnU0NNNXC6Q).
> 
> This is halfway a love letter to Destiny worldbuilding and halfway a love letter to a genre I've been calling "weary domestic SF/F," please talk to me about either/both/anything. Thank you for reading!


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